As a member of the ever growing iBF Community (http://www.ibforums.com), I would like to present an advertisement opportunity that may attract your interest.

The iBF (Invision Board Forums) is the newest free forum program on the net that incorporates the use of PHP and MySQL. It's similar to the vBulletin, but does not have the $85.00 price tag attached to it. The board has reached its first full version release bringing more stability along with blistering performance speeds.

I have seen the forums there day in and day out with new posts pleading for free hosting from anyone. So far, host.sk has been the best shot for these people. Nothing against host.sk, but I would certainly like to obtain better for these people.

What I am proposing is a host with spare resources to offer a minimal free hosting package:

20-50 mb space
1-2 gb storage
PHP
MySQL
FTP Access

Now you're probably asking why you would do such a thing, so let me explain why it might be worth your while:

- Free mass advertisement
Cheap advertising for your company or perhaps another paid client via banner, text link, or pop up/under ad to all free accounts. I wouldn't suggest too many ads however, simply b/c it will turn people off to the service.

- Upgrading Opportunities
A way to off-set the cost of running a free hosting operation is to offer small & convient upgrade options for the accounts.

Example:
Pay this much to remove banners...
Pay this much for extra gb bandwidth...etc, etc.

I would also like to volunteer my services to help you in this operation. No, I don't need hosting myself...it's just another way I can help the iBF community. In fact, I have the perfect domain picked out to handle the service.

Thank you for your time, I am hoping at least one host can see that value in this opportunity.. :)

Got a response literally 5 minutes after I posted. Got a deal hammered out, and we're ready to go. You guys can do this on your own, the more sites the better. But I am helping the person that contacted me first.

Have a great night people!

I'm interested in providing free hosting for IBF's members. All the websites will be hosted in our own secure server that we are currently hosting our website (FindEngines.com).

However, I want to discuss our differences on your proposal. As we want to take this opportunity to expand our hosting program, FindEngines! is willing to give away alot of hosting space for IBF but we want it be more distributed. What I meant by that is instead of giving away for example 10gb to 500 people with each account of 20mb, we want to spread out further to offer about 5-10mb/account. Still, the amount of hosting space we will offer stay the same.

Anyway, if you can compromise to these differences, you can contact me so we can discuss further.

TrungNgo

TrungNgo@lycos.com
FindEngines.com

What I posted up there is the "minimum" requirements for the hosting the forum program. Those figures were gathered by polling several ibf users, and a co-owner of the board program. Having specifics lower than that would only make the service non-usable and worthless. :(

Again, I have already picked a host to team with for this project. But there is nothing stopping you from setting this up yourself and running it. My thoughts are that there is enough pie to go around, the more iBF service sites the better. I'll even give you a domain name you could try:

http://www.freeibh.com ( free invision board host )

We have chosen http://www.ibhosters.com for our service.