These will sound like silly questions, probably...

[HipKat]

There is a long-running, local sports team forum that is closing down and to many of us, it's been a home for some years.
The owner has no interest in selling the site to someone who'd keep it running. I have offered to host and run a new forum.

I have built (not forums) websites in the past but it's been 20 years. All self-hosted, building the site with Front Pager or Dreamweaver and uploading it to a web hosting server(s). Please forgive me for sounding like a complete noob. Back then it was all WYSIWYG. I never mastered or understood things like MySPL, WP, etc, so I need to keep this as simple as I can.

My take after looking over everything here is that is a thing of the past? Everything is now hosted on XF servers and edited with a Cpanel? Meaning, I don't need to go find a web hosting service anymore.

Also, I have my own domain name. Branding is important, so the site would be www.name.com, correct? Meaning none of these would be in the URL;

• name.community.forum
• name.xenforo.cloud
• name.xenforo-hosting.com

I signed up for a Demo last week but got pulled away from all this so I never got a chance to play with it.

I appreciate anyone's time and direction here. I'm sure once I work the rust off, the site design and management will be no problem

 

[Chris D]

You can either have us host the software for you on XenForo Cloud or you can purchase a self hosted license.

The majority of things can be managed through style properties which are various settings which control various options such as colours or logos which you can upload via the admin control panel. This is the same for both Cloud and the self hosted version.

In theory you shouldn’t have to write your own HTML or CSS. But it’s still a steep learning curve. A lot of the time you can achieve the look you want either by adjusting the colour palette or by downloading a ready-made third party style.

If you do go with XenForo Cloud you will initially start with one of our own domains and you can continue to use that if you wish but if you want to connect your own custom domain then that’s possible and fairly easy to do.

Let us know if you have any more questions.

 

[HipKat]

You can either have us host the software for you on XenForo Cloud or you can purchase a self hosted license.

The majority of things can be managed through style properties which are various settings which control various options such as colours or logos which you can upload via the admin control panel. This is the same for both Cloud and the self hosted version.

In theory you shouldn’t have to write your own HTML or CSS. But it’s still a steep learning curve. A lot of the time you can achieve the look you want either by adjusting the colour palette or by downloading a ready-made third party style.

If you do go with XenForo Cloud you will initially start with one of our own domains and you can continue to use that if you wish but if you want to connect your own custom domain then that’s possible and fairly easy to do.

Let us know if you have any more questions.

Thanks for getting back so quickly.
I should have specified that I have no interest in self-hosted and also that in the past, I have run forums, but they were typically on free-hosted sites. So I’m familiar with adjusting templates and that kind of thing and looking at this site and going through some of the examples of forums, I think I’ll be OK.

But you answered my main questions, and that being that I don’t have to buy Web server space somewhere else if I’m going to use cloud storage, and that developing the look of the site upfront should be fairly easy, and when it comes to adding plug-ins and mods and things like that, there’s a learning curve, but I should be able to adapt.

I think when I get home from work tonight, I will go ahead and sign up for the cloud storage, starter package. The site that I’m going to be replacing only gets about 200 unique visit per day so I shouldn’t have a problem with that package.

Also, looking through the forum, I can see that this place has outstanding, support, so I look forward to working with you guys moving forward.

 

[James]

Just out of curiosity do you offer a localhost test/dev install on XFC? If someone wanted to either play around with templates or alternatively build addons for their site but run cloud? @Chris D

 

[Paul B]

Not at the moment but it is something which we have discussed.

 

[CedricV]

Thanks for getting back so quickly.
I should have specified that I have no interest in self-hosted and also that in the past, I have run forums, but they were typically on free-hosted sites. So I’m familiar with adjusting templates and that kind of thing and looking at this site and going through some of the examples of forums, I think I’ll be OK.

But you answered my main questions, and that being that I don’t have to buy Web server space somewhere else if I’m going to use cloud storage, and that developing the look of the site upfront should be fairly easy, and when it comes to adding plug-ins and mods and things like that, there’s a learning curve, but I should be able to adapt.

I think when I get home from work tonight, I will go ahead and sign up for the cloud storage, starter package. The site that I’m going to be replacing only gets about 200 unique visit per day so I shouldn’t have a problem with that package.

Also, looking through the forum, I can see that this place has outstanding, support, so I look forward to working with you guys moving forward.

Also remember, if in need of support, the XF community is always ready to provide you support, how "silly" it may be.