I would like to start my own forum as a free forum i'd been involved with recently at forumsdot.com crashed and now seems dead forever... First question... who would you recommend as a good host provider- competitive rates, ease of use, no downtime, 24 hour support etc... I was looking at godaddy.com others I know of are yahoo etc? We would have at least 50 starting members... but we all post a LOT... will definitely have more members before long as this was without search engine help etc- it was just word of mouth. How much bandwidth do you think we would need? Lastly how difficult should it be to set-up and maintain a basic forum such as this for a complete beginner assuming we will be using Phpbb? If any one knows anything about the forumsdotcom forums crash I would also like any information... Thanks a lot for any suggestions
Go with GoDaddy or Yahoo. Either of their decent packages should provide plenty of bandwidth for you. I would go to www.opensourcecms.com find the comparison page where it lists the various forum software out there along with ratings.
Any host that offers Fantastico would probably work well for you. With Fantastico you can easily install phpbb and smf both of which are very good forum scripts. Many here have had good success with Hostgator and they have a very good reputation elsewhere as well.
Inmotionhosting.com has the best support, you can even request a call. I've been with them and I gotta say their customer service is the second after Rackspace.