Question for admin

[(goran)]

Hi

As you may know, the msn boards are about to be shut down and a possibility to migrate to
Multiply has been offered. Multiply seems to be intolerably slow and does not seem to
meet the requirements for a highly specialized forum such as Shadow Music. (And it probably won't
get any better when all msn groups with millions of members have migrated)

How is this forum built and hosted, this would be a perfect form for us freaks!

[(admin)]

Goran: Thanks for this great question. I will have our technical wizard stop by with the details. I agree with your assessment, however, and I suspect that Multiply will not be as efficient as you might like it to be.

I think you would find phpBB to be more to your liking in concert with a dedicated server.

I will leave the rest to Gil.

[(goran)]

Thanks

I suspect there must be money involved in som way but there are no fees?

I mean e. g. web hosting, internet connection, hardware?, software and so forth..........

[(gibsonlp)]

Hello Goran.

I highly recommend phpbb3, they have made a quantum leap since phpbb2 which was pretty bad, phpbb3 is very powerful and feature rich and very easy to mod.
phpbb3 is also free...

As for the hosting: It's all about the traffic.
Actually, rickresource could live in a shared server provided that the package is large enough, however - rickresource has a "special" feature in which many users receive new posts via email which is a problem in a shared server.
Most providers (if not all) will limit you to 500 emails per day. Rickresource is sending out close to 20,000 emails per day (subscribers X subscribed forum X posts on these forums). This is something no shared host will allow, if you don't plan on having this feature - you can start with a medium sized package on a good shared host provider (such as bluehost.com)
Another thing to think about is that shared servers tend to be slow sometimes as they host many other sites, one of them could be eating up the server resources for a while and you'll feel it.

Of course - the best thing would be to have a dedicated server, but it is:
a. a lot more expensive (at least 10 times of a normal shared host price)
b. you will have to administrate your server which is time consuming and requires more than basic knowledge (unless you let the hosting company do it, and then you pay another fee for that too...)
c. Most dedicated servers have cheap hardware with little or no redundancy (especially in the storage area), this means that if something goes wrong and you don't have backups - you will lose your entire data.

I suggest to sign up with bluehost.com and such for a month or two, it's not that expensive and you could play around with phpbb3 there (please note that their $7 price is only if you commit to 2 years, if you commit to 3 months it is $10 + $30 setup fee... I referred you to bluehost since they are known to be pretty good with phpbb installations and they could help you if you have problems.