Starting a New Forum Website

[TheFoxRocks]

Hey guys and gals,

I was hoping this community could help me. I have been reading on here a little to try and figure things out and understand that some things have recently changed with the XenForo platform if I understand correctly. I am nearly new to website design and the only way I can accomplish it is with software that helps you do so. I took some Dreamweaver and it is just not something I wanted to invest a lot of time learning. That brings me to my first question.

If it helps I would love my website to be similar to www.lawnsite.com for reference.

1.) If I reserve my own website with a domain provider can I simply implement the XenForo software/client over my website or do I need to lease my website at XenForo? I have no clue how this works.

2.) I am making this community because I and others see a need for it. However, with time I hope that I will be able to generate ad revenue and I heard that using XenForo has big advantages in this category. Is this true?

3.) I guess my final question is whether or not this is something that one person with limited knowledge will be able to figure out? Like most websites I plan to appoint moderators and such to help out but I guess a lot of the work will come from me using the software.

4.) Also I would like to know about cost, I did a little research and saw the plans seem to start at $60.00 a month. I saw there is also free software available as well. So could I start out with the free software and achieve what I want and if I begin to get more traffic or expand will I be able to easily transition?

You guys do not need to answer every question. It would be great if you knew something about a particular topic and shed some light on it for me. I appreciate any aid in advance.

 

[Dragonfruit]

So I do not know if anyone on here knows anything about ads but I think a conservative estimate that I would like to have as far as users go is about 10,000. This is a very niche thing and we are spread across websites, Facebook pages, etc. So it is hard to guesstimate how many I am going to have off start of after a year. Since it is so niche I also think that I am going to be able to target advertisers that want to get the word out to my specific community.

Yes, because it depends on your ad service. Adsense has bidding for the advertisers, so they'll choose whether or not to bid to place ads on your site. Additionally what you're not accounting for is ad block. Many people use them. Of the 10,000 users, how many of those are using ad block? You just don't know.

And of course, you don't know how many of those 10,000 users will actually click the ads either. FYI, you cannot promote/ask users to click ads. That will get you banned from the ad platforms.

 

[TheFoxRocks]

You'd lose all of the modifications you made/installed in phpBB and your members will have to adjust to something "different" (xenForo) later.

So IMO, it's best to start with xenForo if you're confident your idea will thrive.

I am fairly confident that if I make a good first impression with the website it will thrive. Like I was mentioning in my previous post that you probably did not see yet. We are a large growing number of people (equipment owners without saying much more) that have no real home so to say.

 

[Telesphoreo]

To be honest, I do not know how many I will get. However, the Facebook group has close to 10,000 now and I know there are others that refuse to use it and stick to websites where they can post their topic. It is 100% a growing community as well.

So to start off I would buy my domain name from a service (such as HostGator etc) and then purchase the $60.00 version of XenForo and begin to put my site together? I realize this is obviously ridiculously oversimplified but this is basically where I start? Once I have my domain reserved how do I implement the XenForo software over it? I am guessing this is a tutorial here somewhere to get started with it?

I am not sure since I don't use XenForo cloud, but it is most likely a CNAME entry that you add for with a record pointing to XenForo. It will then redirect to your site. I personally use Namecheap + Cloudflare to protect my site and they're reasonably priced. Not sure if I'm allowed to name specific companies but that's what I use.

 

[TheFoxRocks]

Of course you want to encourage discussions to be done there, but think of other features you can implement to show how much more people can do on the new XF site versus the limitations of Facebook groups.

Yes, yes is there a place here maybe someone recalls where I could read about the various advantages a XenForo site would hold over a Facebook group? This is obviously a boast I already thought about to get people to navigate.

I think I already mentioned it but my biggest obstacle is bringing people together from the various websites, Facebook and YouTube and showing them having our own community on a website is what we need.

 

[Telesphoreo]

Two things I see with Cloud that you may want to consider is the 500,000 pageview limit. Depending on how active it is, you may reach that limit, especially if you anticipate 10,000 users. Also, 50GB of storage isn't that much space. You can disable people uploading attachments but those are two things to also consider.

 

[Telesphoreo]

Yeah so what does this mean? Because 50GB isn't a lot at all. If people are posting pictures (I anticipate a whole lot) I am going to hit 50GB in what a single day? So you get 50GB before it starts erasing old content or something?

I do not expect all 10,000 users to come over all at once, but I am hoping with time I will have a lot more than even that. I have no way of knowing for sure though.

I am not sure if you can purge old attachments. It depends on how many they upload and the resolution

 

[Muddy Boots]

@TheFoxRocks

Late to the party however, My Two Penneth

For hosting, I would seriously recommend you don't host on your home ISP, you will just aggravate members and loose them, take a look at @eva2000's CentMinMod LEMP Stack! A lot here use it, get yourself a small VPS that is easily upgraded, CMM is really easy to implement and maintain, support from @eva2000 is second to nonce (apart from @Brogan here of course).....

I'd also recommend you dont use a cpanel/direcadmin server, memory and resource hungry and expensive, shared hosting is an option but has its limits including bad IP reputation from other users...... So just go the CMM VPS route and in years to come you will certainly not regret it, CMM Uses CentOS7 so spin your VPS up with that on install, @eva2000 is working on a new CMM release to support Alma Linus 8 at present.

Next be careful picking a VPS, Vultr for instance will not (in my opinion and experience) open any mail ports which means more jumping through loops to get the mail out of the server, Hetzer will open ports under specific issues. My suggestion is if you go down the CMM VPS route, use SMTP mail for the community mail (like NameCheaps Mail offering) and get mail ports open on the server (I now use Hetzer) just for sending out VPS alerts (ie logins, firewalls etc) There is some interesting chat over at CMM forums on how CMM users do their VPS emails. You can get free $$$'s and spin up a VPS for a month and it will cost you nothing.

I would personally recommend Namecheap for domain hosting, I have been with them for 12+ years now and have nothing bad to say about them

Just bite the bullet and pay the XF license and dont go down the phpBB route or any free forum software as then when you migrate to XF it will just be a headache (do-able) so start fresh now especially if your site will grow with members like you suggest it will.

For a theme take a look at @Russ PixelExit themes - Excellent, very fast and clean, very customisable, and @Russ will do customer theme work and his support is again second to none.

Links in my Sig for Hetzner ($20) - you do get some free $$$ credit with them, basic VPS - AN example of pricing is a CX21 Hetzner VPS, 40GB HDD, 4GB Ram, Standard (shared resources not dedicated), 20TB Traffic costs 5.88 Euros a month, with automatic backups 7.06 Euros a month.

Finally if you spin up a VPS like Hetzner, dont pick a large one at first ie 16GB 160GB HDD as you cannot downgrade to a small image (HDD size wise) so just pick a small one with something like 4GB ram although it will run on 2GB........

 

[Telesphoreo]

Of course you don't need to, if you're happy to make it a target for hacking and to cause yourself 6x the work. It's also totally possible to write your own custom forum software 100% from scratch and many people have done it (originaltrilogy for example still uses 100% custom software for their forum). It's possible to do all kinds of things DIY, but that doesn't make it the best option in all situations! Webmin & Virtualmin aren't bloated, they use very little resources.

Not installing an admin panel doesn't automatically make you a target for hacking... That's illogical and not backed up with any sort of facts. I'm not saying to write anything from scratch. Installing a database software using the CLI is not coding anything from scratch so I'm not quite sure where you got that from. If you (not you specifically, anyone) doesn't want to do anything DIY, then self hosting is not the option for you.

 

[dknife]

If you're operating a VPS you need to be able to DIY, but you don't need to and nor is necessarily desirable to do everything when you can let a Control Panel handle part of the workload. Why not write your own perl-based webserver as well, why not ditch OpenSSL and write your own TLS implementation, why stop with the CP?

You're being ridiculous. Going from operating your own VPS and using built-in firewall functions to coding your own webserver and SSL stack is like saying if you ride a bike you might as well just build your own Tesla.

 

[ForumFan]

Again, you really need to get up to date with your facts. You seem selective about what you want to share. You seem to love sharing old news like it's somehow recent or new news to try and push a belief or agenda.

Even if tomorrow numbers went down again, it doesn't mean they will stay that way. You can still be gaining in popularity even if numbers temporarily go down. Now if it was a downward trend for months and years, ok. But this was nothing like that.

Daily Facebook users up again after first-ever decline

But Facebook owner Meta is struggling with its slowest revenue growth since at least 2012.

www.bbc.com

Facebook MAU worldwide 2023| Statista

The company reported over three billion monthly active users in Q4 2023, making Facebook the largest social network worldwide.

www.statista.com

Facebook Is Growing Its Daily Users Again

The social media giant's stock was up 19% after reporting mostly strong first-quarter earnings on Wednesday.

www.cnet.com

And they really don't care if they lost you. Over 99.999% of the people on there don't either because they don't know you. You leaving has had zero material impact on them or others coming or going or their popularity or economic gain/loss. Period.

Got stock in Facebook, do ya?

Oh, I'm pretty sure my name came up at their last board meeting... "Oh no! PatriotGB stopped posting and reading the FB feed. Crap! We need to change course and repent for our errant ways! We can win him back! We MUST win him back!"

Yep... I'm almost positive that's what happened.

 

[Dragonfruit]

My sites are both registered and hosted by namecheap.
I've tried expensive rip offs that have scammed me in the past.
Have had no trouble with namecheap.

It's great that it works for you, but obviously others and myself have different opinions.

I too only use NameCheap as a domain registrar. I've learned a long time ago it's much better to keep the domain registrar and hosting separate.

I cringe a bit at NameCheap's support whenever I do need their assistance with the domains, SSL, and billing. Much of it is likely a language barrier, but there's often times they don't fully understand the problems I'm trying to illustrate.

While KnownHost has been fast, very responsive, and based on their messages, are very proficient with the English language, so I rarely have to repeat or rephrase something to get them to fully understand the issue.

I only recommend NameCheap to people in my circle of life as a domain registrar, and KnownHost for actual hosting.

 

[Dragonfruit]

Recent reviews on Trustpilot suggest you should probably steer clear of Namecheap for both domain registration and hosting.

Namecheap is rated "Excellent" with 4.3 / 5 on Trustpilot

Do you agree with Namecheap's TrustScore? Voice your opinion today and hear what 18,477 customers have already said.

uk.trustpilot.com

I'm reading through it, and a lot of it, I find it hard to believe it isn't the customer's fault.

- Like the domain hijacking. In today's digital age, all owners should be using long, unique, and complex passphrases, on top of MFA.

- There's one about the user wanting to jump ship, so they let the domain expire first so they can rebuy it elsewhere, but NameCheap 'registered' it, and demanded a large fee for it back. All domain registrars do this. It's called a grace period, there's a recovery charge for restoring your domain during the grace period. The fact that the customer is upset and blaming NameCheap here is their own fault with not understanding how domain registrars works - they could have switched it to a new registrar with even as much 6 months remaining, and when it registers to the new registrar it will expire in 1.6 years, because upon registering to the new domain registrar, you pay for a renewal, and it just stacks the time on. I know this because I've changed through multiple hosts.

- The company credit card issue - I've managed companies with NameCheap, and they send warnings before the next renewals or taking action, which I bring up to Finance to help resolve. It's my opinion there's either something more nefarious that reviewer isn't disclosing, or they were just incompetent and ignored the warnings.

- The personal/private email issue - this exists with MANY companies. It's why I've learned to separate everything. I use a very specific email for web hosting services, online shopping, public sites/forums, etc. It seems logical to not set yourself up to a single point of failure.

The bulk of the negative stuff I'm otherwise seeing is in the hosting; CPanel, VPS, hosting performance, services suspended because of abuse reports. Who knows, that may even be caused by me.

When I encounter phishing stuff, I trace down the web hosting they're using. I know I've reported several with NameCheap, with screenshot proof.

I would even find it hard to believe those reviews. Could be legit fraudsters suspended and they're retaliating with negative reviews.

 

[Dragonfruit]

Doesn't almost everyone use cpanel?

Basically, but also the whole argument of CPanel being compatible with vBulletin & XenForo, that one just really doesn't make sense. What control panel it is has nothing to do with vBulletin & XenForo compatibility, I've used custom panels by the host, Plesk, CPanel & Direct Admin - which all worked fine so as long as the server provided PHP & MySQL services.

 

[80sDude]

For hosting my forums I always go with a VPS from Knownhost. As for my domains I use GoDaddy.

 

[CedricV]

$2.99/m is considered not cheap?

I’m guessing she/he thinks anything is overpriced.

 

[TPerry]

Web Hosting - Your Path to the Perfect Hosting Plan - Namecheap

Discover Namecheap, your top web hosting provider for affordable and reliable hosting. For beginners and professionals, we offer cheap hosting plans to fit your needs.

www.namecheap.com

Meanwhile.. many of us will continue to use a VPS (and higher end shared hosting) that provides well more than low-end shared hosting, even though we don't "need" it. We prefer a higher performance level for our sites.

 

[MySiteGuy]

Buddyboss isn't bbpress, though it is compatible with it's tables and many addons.

 

[MySiteGuy]

No it's some addon that supposed to make it look better. BBpress is attrocious in itself.
looks too old fashioned.

You apparently don't know much/anything about Buddy Boss.

The Buddy Boss theme is an addon the Buddy Boss platform uses, but is not Buddy Boss itself.

Its much more than a theme and making it look better. There are several modules it includes which bring additional features bbpress does not have. Plus numerous app integrations, native iOS and Android apps They aren't even close, except at a storage level - but that can be said for most WP addons.

 

[Dragonfruit]

I am fairly confident that if I make a good first impression with the website it will thrive. Like I was mentioning in my previous post that you probably did not see yet. We are a large growing number of people (equipment owners without saying much more) that have no real home so to say.

I agree, for $60 a month, maybe an additional $12-15 a year for the domain, it seems worth it to give this a try, especially if you have a 10,000 users base already.