I need advice on what to do with my message board

Hey guys,

For the past (almost) 10 years, I've been running a message board. I'm sure that everyone who runs a forum here has experienced things like MMORPGs and social media slowly eat away at their membership and my message board was no exception, unfortunately.

I want to keep the members that are still there together and also keep the threads/posts, but I also don't want to keep paying the monthly server fee if it's not going to be a bustling community. What options do I have?

I'm running a vBulletin 3.8.4 forum, btw.

Thanks in advance.

 

You don't really have any options, you want to keep it hosted but you don't want to pay.

How much are you paying per month for hosting? Maybe you could switch over to a free forum provider like freeboards? However if you did that you would lose control of your content.

 

I'm paying about $20 currently. I know it doesn't sound like much, but I would rather use that money for something else (paying Netflix or Pandora, for example). Right now it feels like I'm taking a $20 bill every month and lighting it on fire with the current status of the board. Like I said, it has some activity, but it's been dying a slow death over the past few years.

I thought about Freeboards, but like you said I would lose control over my content. :/

 

The other things you could do is downgrade your hosting plan. Since it doesn't get much activity anymore you would probably be able to get away with a share hosting plan which cost only a few dollars a month, not $20.

 

I am on a shared hosting plan currently. I'm with Liquidweb so maybe that explains things.

 

Is there something that is preventing you from switching to another provider? $20/month for shared hosting is ridiculous.

 

I actually tried using another host at one point (HostGator) and naturally they were cheaper, but holy hell did I encounter a bunch of downtime and they gave me very little bandwidth (not an issue now lol) and disk storage.

If you or anybody has any recommendations for a dependable (and much cheaper shared web hosting plan), please share. Thanks

 

I have never used HostGator but from what I've read they were really good until they got bought out by EIG and then things really went downhill.

I have been using CrocWeb for close to a year now and I'm pretty happy with their service. They are quite reasonably priced and I haven't had any downtime except for a period of about 2 days back in January when they were experiencing some DDOS attacks. They did provide their users with 3 months of free service for the trouble though and kept people updated by Twitter which really impressed me.

 

Most of it depends on the size of the forum and how much traffic it's getting. There are lots of cheap hosting companies out there, but, can they provide the resources your forum needs? A smallish forum with casual traffic would probably do alright on cheap shared hosting. Something with more than moderate traffic and a large amount of forums/posts, will most likely have performance issues or exceed the allotted resources (e.g. CPU and RAM). What are the stats of your forum?

 

Cool, hopefully they offer service to the states. I'll check them out. Thanks, Random.

Again, if anybody else has any recommendations, I would really appreciate it.

 

I'm about to turn in, Keith, but I'll let you know tomorrow.

 

Okay, no laughing now

This was for the month of July:

Unique: 3,637; Number of visits: 9,008; Pages: 74,039; Hits: 138,361; Bandwidth: 4.28GB

The board has currently 9,219 threads and a total of 615,948 posts.

 

That amount of traffic should easily be able to fit on a shared host. Also, considering you are already using shared hosting - switching from one provider to another is even less of an issue.

 

My advice would be to find shared hosting that is NOT unlimited. Those kind of services, more often than not, are incredibly oversold and will definitely give you performance issues and downtime. There are tons of reputable hosting companies, which offer more than enough space and bandwidth to fit your needs. Take the time to shop around, it will pay off.

 

Thanks for all the advice, guys. Do you have any recommendations, Keith? Don't worry, I won't hold you responsible or anything lol

 

LiquidWeb is a solid company as you know but if you are looking to save some green check out InMotion Hosting and A2 Hosting.

 

Thanks..