Free Forum Hosting Vs. Open Source

[Kane]

There are a lot of free forum hosting platforms such as Proboards, Jcink, Forumotion, etc. There are also a lot of Open Source Forum Platforms, between these two forum management options, what do you like? What are your reasons? How do you compare Free  Hosted Forums With Open Source Forums? I do not have any experience in running a forum on free platforms, however, I have managed Open Source forums.

Edited February 19, 2024 by Kane

[GrantHorizons]

Free - you get what you pay for. Reliability, security, support - not so much. If you're just starting with a small site and want to get the feel of the effort required and learn, it's great. Past that, no thank you.

[Kane]

8 hours ago, GrantHorizons said:

Free - you get what you pay for. Reliability, security, support - not so much. If you're just starting with a small site and want to get the feel of the effort required and learn, it's great. Past that, no thank you.

Well, said. If you do not have any experience and just want to learn about community management, free forums can be great. However, I believe investing in a domain and hosting, and using open source is better as you will never lose your community. Even when it is your hobbyist project, it makes sense to have ownership

[Nomad]

I have a member on many free hosted forums. These forums look great, the owner seem to have put a lot of effort in creating these communities but the problem is with subdomain. If you have a subdomain site, no body takes you seriously.

[dismalbliss]

10 hours ago, Nomad said:

If you have a subdomain site, no body takes you seriously.

I agree with this.

If you want to start small with as little startup costs as possible, register a domain, point it to a cheap shared hosting provider, and use a free script like MyBB, phpBB, SMF, or Flarum. Then as you get more popular you can migrate to paid software, which is Invision, Woltlab, VBulletin, and (sorta semi-abandoned) Xenforo.

 

[Nomad]

2 hours ago, dismalbliss said:

I agree with this.

If you want to start small with as little startup costs as possible, register a domain, point it to a cheap shared hosting provider, and use a free script like MyBB, phpBB, SMF, or Flarum. Then as you get more popular you can migrate to paid software, which is Invision, Woltlab, VBulletin, and (sorta semi-abandoned) Xenforo.

 

Sometimes you never get popular and you end up using open source platforms forever. 😄 That's what happening to me. I started with SMF but never got to the point where I had a lot of users and activities that required the community to be moved with premium platform for better flexibility.

[Maria]

Choice between free hosted forums and open source forum software should depend on your objectives, skills, and resources. Even when you are using open source, you need to invest in domain and hosting, you also need some level of skills, if you have these things you can try free hosted platforms where are easy to operate.

[Shortie]

Free hosted forums are ideal if the forum you are creating is something as a hobby and you are not too fussed about being able to have access to that content to move it should you wish to move to your hosting. With free hosted forums, the content and the forum are not something you fully own and that is one downside. 

Open source software is ideal and one I would much prefer as that way I own the content within the forum and can move it if I feel the need to. 

For those who are new to forums, free-hosted is ideal and makes it so much easier to set up and have a forum. 

[Destiny]

Forums that are free-hosted are something I have looked into but never used. From my research on free-hosted forums, it would seem that a lot of them do not offer support to move to open-source software if you ever want to down the line and some of them even charge a fee to move if you wish to down the line.

I find that most free-hosted forums are used by those who have a forum as a hobby.