[erikzen]

Here's a lesson to you all. Don't open your mouth unless you are prepared to back it up.

As many of you know I'm in graduate business school (yes, I know, it seems like forever but I do graduate in May!) and one of my classmates wants to form a graduate business school association. I said to him that I thought that on our website that we should have a bulletin board as we want to bring together local students, those on our international campuses, faculty, alumni and members of the business community. I volunteered to work with the VP of communications to develop my vision of the online community. Well, what do you think happened? He said, "OK you're now VP of technology. Make it happen!"

If any of you know me at all I'm no techie. I needed the administrators to come over to my house just so I could register for this site. But here I am charged with making sure the website gets up and running. What I'm looking for is advice on forum software. It seems like the vBulletin software on this site works great (best I've experienced) but I've also seen free software out there, such as YaBB. Does anyone have any suggestions? Free software is nice because we have zero funds right now, although the vBulletin is not prohibitively expensive, about $160 for the first year and then $30 per year after that for upgrades.

Also, I have no idea what kind of bandwidth I'm going to need to host the site. Right now there are only a handful of members in the organization but ultimately we'd like to include as many students in the graduate business school as possible - current enrollment is around 500. Best case scenario would be to have 1000 members when you include alumni and bussiness people, and support for guests. Of that I don't think you would ever have more than 20 or 30 users on at once and this is being optimistic.

This gets me to my next question. What type of hosting service would I need and are there any good hosting companies anyone can recommend? One of the undergraduates who wants to help design the website has suggested 1&1. They have a $9.95 a month business package, which seems like it should be fine. If the site is successful you can always upgrade.

Any suggestions are welcomed and encouraged!

 

[dreamnid]

It has been awhile since I played around with forums - but I still consider vBulletin one of the best ones out there simply due to versatility and level of control you get. Most people usually starts out with phpBB (I'm guessing because it is packaged in cPanel). It obviously isn't very anept compared to vBulletin, but it does get the job done and it is free.

The big warning - when you're starting out with a few members browsing the forums, you should be able to get away with any shared hosting plan. However, when 50s+ members start to go on, your hosting company will probably terminate your account because forums use a lot of CPU resources. At that point, you'll probably will want to look at a dedicated server (which as the name implies, the server is only serving your website) which starts around $100/month. Hopefully by then, you'll have the funds to support the server.