I hardly spent anything apart from color customization, hosting, domain etc of my phpbb forum but now I am thinking of shutting it down, sick and tired of spammers.
enough for decent hosting. Phpbb goes for free. I think i should hire some posters, but those able to post in french are rather rare.
No quick fix. Never paid for posting, but it was a slow process. Thousands of dollars in google advertising to attract members.
I have never spent dime on any of my forum & I never plant to. You can get free hosting for your forum 10gb space & 70gb to 100gb bandwith will be enough space bandwith for a chat forum now if you run a adult or warez forum that might be a different story
Also the question is how many did you have them accessing per day and how long did the forum run for? Those are large numbers but it needs to be put into perspective. And that's either a quality friend or a quality server service to be able to stand up that kind of use without any complaints from the proprietor.
Hah ... snap. I already had the forum up with minimal posts and free forum software, but when the old forum died a bunch of people came across and everyone wanted the same software as the old forum so I got donations to upgrade it. So it costs domain registration + ongoing license fees + hosting. The ads cover those just fine. Its hard to start a forum out of the blue though, you really do need a group of Real People to kickstart it. I have two forums and will probably be starting a third at some point, they're all attached to something else somehow, not totally freestanding. I once tried to start a new forum on an existing site with 2000 visitors a day and didn't get any signups so I can see why people would pay for those initial seed posts. But really, you could sprout multiple personality disorder and do it yourself if you really wanted.
To get setup, I probably invested $500 in software and design, apart from that it has just been hosting costs. However, in recent months I've been spending several hundred per month on link building.
if u use phpbb and it costs only domain+hosting.(around 50$). if u use vbulletin the cost vary rapidly as well as the popularity of the site. if u have money i recommend vbulletin. if u dont,use phpbb3.
I spent more than 100$ in all my projects. I use my own host for my sites and only pay for domains and licenses.
I have a Dedicated Server that costs 90 USD / month with cPanel and WHM ... The forum I installed myself. Haven't spend a dime on developing my website. (except the RocketTheme and Yootheme one time membership)