Want a web host for a forum and two dozen blogs

[RonStewart]

My college class (22 members) is having a 25th anniversary reunion next year. We would like a web site with a home page, a forum, and an individual blog for each of the class members. Cost must be reasonable.

 

I have made web sites and programmed phpbb forums in the past.

 

I would be grateful if people would direct me to a provider that will meet our needs.

[R80RTKen]

Dreamhost. Been using them for a few years now. Can not beat them for the money.

 

[bakerzdosen]

I may have a little bit of experience with this.

 

From the needs you've described, I'd check here:

 

JAISP

 

Good guy, good setup, reasonable prices, and you wouldn't have to do all the work yourself.

 

If you want a more "corporate" or "industrial" type of setup, try here:

 

Fibernet.

 

It'd be a couple bucks more a month, but offer much more redundancy. Fibernet's VPS's are pretty reasonably priced (for the lower RAM ones anyway) if you really wanted to own and manage the whole enchilada. For 22 members (we technically have 18,417 here), 128MB of RAM should suffice, but 256MB wouldn't be outrageous.

 

If you're looking to host in Canada... well, I don't have any direct experience or knowledge about that. However, webhostingtalk.com is a good place to start.

 

Good luck.

 

Edit: Oh, I forgot, mediatemple.net's grid might not be a bad option either.

 

If you really wanted to get your hands dirty, look at Joyent's 1/4GiB Accelerator.

[David]

Why would you shift the cost of this to yourself, building something from scratch and then, God bless us all, be responsible for support?

 

Just set something up with a firm that does this for a living and let everybody pay for it. I'm talking about something like vBulletin, which is probably now the best platform out there:

 

http://secure.hostgator.com/forward.php?page=shared.shtml&gclid=CImUt5fh2JwCFchW2godFG5wZg

 

http://www.urljet.com/?gclid=CInD75jh2JwCFRdc2god52JRYw

[RonStewart]

I could have gone with Dreamhost, but they are very similar to the host that I already use, and wanted to try something a bit different. Jaisp is too expensive to justify for a very low bandwidth application. If David had posted an hour earlier, I likely would have gone with one of his vBulletin companies.

 

As it stands, I am giving goDaddy a try. $17 for the first three months, including a .net domain name. If it doesn't work out, not much money is lost, and I can try hostgator.

 

Now, even though I didn't take your advice, it was very valuable to me. It got me started, and helped me focus my search. So thank you, gentlemen.

[vizhip]

You might want to look at http://www.lunarpages.com/

 

and yes... one day I will actually DO something with my web page from them... for now it is a place holder and e-mail source...

 

www.hipcomputersolutions.com

 

Maybe I should put the RT on that site... )))

 

Regards -

-Bob

 

--edit--

 

I do have a phpbb forum lurking off the main page, but you have to have the URL to get there... and it doesn't get any traffic to speak of...

 

Also need to change the page to add a bunch of years experience, but am too lazy to do so... )))