PhpBB is an open source forum software that anyone can download and use. It is free to use, and many webmasters like to use this software to run online communities. Of course, you have to ensure that the software works seamlessly with your web hosting service provider. Here is how to choose a compatible host for PhpBB. 1) Linux hosting. Since the software is written in PHP, it's best that you choose Linux hosting. Windows servers can also run PHP scripts, but some features do not run in a Windows environment (e.g. mod rewrite). Mod rewrite is important for SEO purposes. 2) Cpanel control panel. Most Linux servers come with free Cpanel admin control panel. Once you have access to the control panel, you can login and install the PhpBB script. Cpanel also comes with Fantastico. This useful feature can help you install the forum within minutes. It offers an easy to use installation wizard, which promote, guide and assist you with the entire installation process. 3) Hosting space and bandwidth. The hosting industry is very competitive. Today, you find that you can unlimited hosting space and bandwidth on shared hosting plans. Usually, if you run static sites on these plans, you will not encounter any problems. However, if you intention is to run a forum, your site may eventually end up hogging too much resources. The problem with running a forum is that if the site grows too fast, there will be too many concurrent users connecting to the server. This means that the number of requests that is sent to the server will be dramatically increased. Sometimes, this may cause the server to slow down temporary. If the same issue occurs on numerous occasions, other users of the same shared environment may start to complain. As a result, your hosting account may be suspended temporarily. Therefore, to avoid having your hosting account disrupted, always make sure that you plan for the growth of your site. If you see that the site is growing rapidly, make plans to migrate the site to a more stable environment. For instance, instead of hosting the site on a shared hosting plan, host it on a VPS hosting package. With a VPS plan, you get dedicated server resources and admin rights. As a general rule of thumb, you can continue using the shared plans if you site has less than 2000 members. Anything more than 2000 members, you will have to consider taking up VPS or dedicated hosting. Of course, VPS and dedicated hosting cost a lot more when compared to shared hosting. So if you starting a brand new forum, it is completely alright to setup the forum on a shared server. It takes time for the form to grow to several thousand members. So you may be saving on hosting fees for the first 6 months or so. When the forum starts to gain momentum, migrate the entire site to a new hosting environment with more resources.
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