StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Get your mind out of the gutter perverts!

She has an idea of a website that she wants to start, with a forum similar to this.

What would she and I need exactly to do this? Money wise, hardware wise and software wise.

Any info, links or tips would be greatly appreciated.

Webspace, which would mean renting it from a forum provider(I do believe that's what they're called. EZBoard springs to mind) or buying and maintaining your own webserver as Wong does, although that's probably rather expensive in its own regard.

Most web hosting companies allow one to run everything needed for a forum (php and MySQL). My fiancee has hosting from Globat. She gets pissed at them sometimes because they'll upgrade the packages available, but current subscribers don't get the upgrades, but it's decently cheap. Colocation solutions are probably way outside of her price range. Just getting a forum provider won't allow her to have an actual website as well, either.

You can get a relatively cheap dedicated webhost for under $10 a month if you don't need much traffic wise.

havokeff wrote:Get your mind out of the gutter perverts!

She has an idea of a website that she wants to start, with a forum similar to this.

What would she and I need exactly to do this? Money wise, hardware wise and software wise.

Any info, links or tips would be greatly appreciated.

It depends on how much traffic you're expecting. Small forums can be run off most webhosts nowadays, but if you get the kind of traffic that SDN does, you can forget anything but a dedicated server. The database server for this forum is configured to use 1GB of RAM, if that gives you any idea of how resource-hungry it is. The disk space consumed by the database is roughly 3.5GB.

LibArc, while small, does well with the hosting we get from Admhosting (though they recently got sold, I don't remember who the buyer was). Prices range about 80 USD a year for a gig of website space, unlimited mysql databases, CGI, etc etc. oh, and about 10gigs of bandwidth a month...

It all depends really, on how much traffic she intends to have, as Wong has pointed out.

I appreciate all the answers and suggestions.... BUT as some of you may or may not know, I'm just a dumb biker and my only real exposure to computers is the internet and the only terms I know are basically what I've learned from this site for posting and such. I'm not familiar with hardware and the technical terms of what makes all this crazy magic happen.

In other words I don't know what some of you are talking about. I of course will be googling everything, but it never quite covers all of it. If you could put up some links to site that are good for this stuff that would be very helpfull.

havokeff wrote:Get your mind out of the gutter perverts!

She has an idea of a website that she wants to start, with a forum similar to this.

What would she and I need exactly to do this? Money wise, hardware wise and software wise.

Any info, links or tips would be greatly appreciated.

Webspace with a provider that provides MySQL and PHP, like GoDaddy.

Then download the free PHPBB software and set it up.