How create a forum website

[johnyow]

phpbb. Use $200 for paying for hosting for lots of years. Go for scalahosting

 

[flprocess]

Wordpress + Phpbb should be the right solution for you. If you mix it right, it will be powerful and has many rich features for you to use and the best part - they are both free (unless you go for premium addons/plugins/themes).

If it is a small website (and it should be for starters) - Get a low cost shared web hosting, it will do the job. Don't forget SSL certificate, most web hosting services now offers it for free via Let's Encrypt, so don't be tempted to buy one (prices can be $50/y). When your forum will start growing (I cross my fingers for you) do think about moving to a VPS, but you should read and know how to operate and maintain it.

Setting up the forum is the easiest part - running a forum (or a community) is difficult, gathering people to be a part of your community could be though and can take months and years. Try to locate the right contributors to promote, be fair and try not to enforce your opinions or ideas on others.

Good luck!

 

[freak7]

vBulletin was popular for that. Olds know that :d

 

[Chris Newman]

Wordpress has many forum themes (templates) and it is easy to implement. You may have some challenges, but their help docs and guides are quite good enough.

 

[i_am_that_i_am]

Hope you have the energy and focus needed to grow and sustain a forum to success, it is no mean feat. Goodluck with your endeavour.

 

[WebWorx_Media]

I hope this is the right topic for this thread if not please forgive my ignorance
I wanna create a forum website about health and fitness targeting only my country by myself I have 200$ a budget and 0 experience I found some basic instructions on google but I need the real thing from you guys
I wanna know how much time it would take to get it done, how to secure it
And can i do it by myself
Im open for all suggestions

Best regards!

You can google "best forum plugins" and read through the results to see which plugin will have all your needs. In as far as site security is concerned you can install the Wordfence plugin. The free version should give your site protection to some point but I would recommend getting the premium version for a forum website. I would also recommend that you do your hosting with inmotionhosting.com because their cPanel comes with Free SSL for life, CP Hulk that protects again brute entry and Sucuri Scan that can scan you site for malware.

 

[Cyw1z]

you can use discourse software for creating forum you can deploy on digitalocean
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorial_collections/how-to-install-discourse
If you don't know how to install then you can buy managed discourse hosting from here (https://www.communiteq.com/)
it will cost you 20$ per month

 

[herr]

@Kaaay please pay attention to what people have suggested and weigh whether a forum is worth it. It's so much easier and cheaper to manage a subreddit or a Telegram group. Forums are becoming a thing of the past just like mailing lists. The ones that are still alive and thriving are breaking the trend only because they have a reputation in some very specific niche. Consider creating a forum-like experience on a platform where your audience is already hanging out instead.

I simply DO NOT AGREE dude, otherwise you will not be on BHW for almost 7 years now.

Forums and emailing are really useful until today. And they will remain like this until there will be a major, very major changing

 

[Developie]

Have you tried Xenforo?

 

[berhas]

hey i have a dream like that too. But first I'm trying to learn something. I delayed my dreams a little.

 

[smmturk]

BHW uses the Xenforo infrastructure, but Xenforo is a paid option. You can use PhpBB as a free option.

 

[seancoder]

Use your enthusiasm and build a forum on the cheapest hosting you can find. In the meantime create a sub reddit or Telegram group and manage it as advised.