Building a new forum

I'm a big football fan and my team greatly needs a new forum. Now that the Internet is nice and mature is there an easy process to do this and what's the cost associated with it? Say for 1500 members at peak times and any embedded pics or videos would just be linked to other locations and not actually hosted on the site?

Thanks,
Duck

phpbb is free, vbulletin is a couple hundred bucks, xenforo is about the same cost. phpbb is probably fine for a small scale forum like you're wanting, there are plenty of resources to get you started with setting one up. Plus, of course, you have to pay for the actual hosting ($5-10 monthly), and there's some level of technical experience involved in setting it up.

I'm sure there are providers what will host, set up, and manage it for you, but there's likely an additional cost associated with it.

Thanks for the heads up. I wouldn't mind paying a little $$$ for a good looking setup. Monthly cost of $50 or less for hosting is the aim but I'm not sure what that would buy me. Reliability and doped are always issues. Www.baylorfans.com is the current board but several of us want to leave. They actual layout of the forum is great and what I like most is the reputation system where you can positive or negative rep people based on their content.

Simple Machine Forums is free, for what it's worth. I help admin my WoW guild's message board based on it, it's decent enough and has plugins/etc. So you would only have to worry about hosting.

I'm sure phpbb and vbulletin are better solutions if you're looking to spend money.

$50/month is more than enough for hosting. I personally use HostGator and StableHost for webhosting. My Counter-Strike clan has been with HostGator for 7.5 years on the same $9.99/month plan with no issues (domain renewal adds a small extra expense on top). We had phpbb (free) in the beginning, and then vBulletin for about 5 years once donations came in enough to support it. We just recently switched to XenForo. I think vB was around $200 for a lifetime license, XenForo is similar.

Lots of choices out there, but for hosting I'd recommend starting out by checking the Shared Hosting offers section over at WebHostingTalk.com. I would also like to point out to stay away from HostGator as HostGator is no longer it's own entity and is owned by EIG, the company that has ruined many many many a great webhost. I would have recommended Arvixe not that long ago, but they too were gobbled up by the megacorp known as EIG.

http://www.linux-depot.com/non-endurance-international-group-eig-hosting/

Basically, find a host not listed there, such as A2Hosting, FreshRoastedHosting, CrocWeb, or a more premium host such as StableHost.


That out of the way, forum choice, there are plenty of choices out there to choose from with phpBB being extremely popular as a free option alongside Vanilla Forum. I would recommend looking for demos of each of your top choices of forum software and test out both the front and back ends to see which impresses you the most.