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dr1819 · 24th April 2006, 09:49

No catches, except perhaps having an add appear at the top of the page. I know from being members on other sites that after about 5 minutes, your brain turns off the ads anyway, so it's certainly not a distraction.

http://www.forumer.com/

More than 87 thousand forums hosted, 1.9 Million users...

It's not like they're new at this! Probably do good backups, too.

kneehighs · 25th April 2006, 00:15

I think this is an alternative worth looking into. As long we could transfer the archives of hhplace to a new server, and preserve their integrity, I would think the pros would outweight the cons, IMO.

Fogane · 25th April 2006, 00:46

Never heard of them before. I would just hope they are rather better than phpbbforfree.com - they have over 50,000 forums and no backups, very poor support and when upgrades are required, don't be surprised when the entire site goes offline for up to two weeks!

dr1819 · 25th April 2006, 10:05

Good points. I found this in the help section on forumer: "Forumer will not and will never provide backups to their users. Sorry. Maybe in the case of Forumer going broke then they might give out backups but I don't see the later of the option happening soon."

Someone mentioned that backups are a security risk, but I don't see how that's possible given certain measures, and another poster simply said that the lack of backups was a means of control by forumer to keep the sites hosted on forumer. You can't pack up and leave if the only access you have is to log in and edit through phpBB.

So, perhaps a paid phpBB option is best, as they should provide both backups as well as the ability for the forum owners to obtain a backup to port elsewhere.

I know from keeping my own websites that I simply edit them on my computer before uploading, so switching hosting companies is no big deal. With bulletin board systems, though, you'd have to convince the server administrators that it's in their best interest to either make a copy or give you enough bandwidth to pull everything, and I know that bandwidth requirements for most bulliten board systems is actually quite small as it's all text (and hypertext) when the images are stored elsewhere and simply referenced.

flavio · 25th April 2006, 13:24

Anyone knows the average bandwidth consumed by hhplace?

I have an idea. The wagoo freehosting service is a choice. 199MB of space and 10GB transfer rate.
It's possible to store a phpbb forum and have it backed-up using mysql mirroring technology.

All we'll have is a "google adds" in the top (takes aproximatelly 5% of the screen). It don't take to much attention (google's mind) helps the site to appear in the search engine and usually shows content related adds (it's good for us, at least).

Well, it's an option.