When you are opening web hosting business, you surely will pickup several clients at first and then slowly (depends on the investment) getting your business known to all people.

Then, you would've want to get to know your clients (or you're not). You will either building a forum or a status blog or both.

Questions are:

1- Would you open a forum eventhough you're just started? Or you would rather wait until you have enough userbase before building up a forum?

2- Do you use the forum to serve supports to your user?

3- Do you build a blog and constant write something on it?

4- Do you the only one who are posting on the blog or your staff as well?

5- Do you bridge userbase on both forum and blogs so 1 login could be used on both places.?

6- For you who are personally using a free forum software, which of the FREE forum software is better? phpbb, smf, mybb, vanilla? (only answer if you are using it)

1- Would you open a forum eventhough you're just started? Or you would rather wait until you have enough userbase before building up a forum?

I think it's nice to have a forum, but you need to have a big userbase to make it a live forum, otherwise users do not participate, hence no reason to have it.

2- Do you use the forum to serve supports to your user?

To keep it under control, i think minor issues maybe.

3- Do you build a blog and constant write something on it?

We use a blog to post company news and events and we host it outside our main website server should anything goes wrong, you have a backup medium to inform your clients what's going on.

4- Do you the only one who are posting on the blog or your staff as well?

I think that depends on how tight you want to keep it under control, but I think that one or two more persons in your staff should be able to post, but trustworthy people only of course.

5- Do you bridge userbase on both forum and blogs so 1 login could be used on both places.?

Mmm, we don't have a forum yet, but I wouldn't do it for the above reason about our blog.

6- For you who are personally using a free forum software, which of the FREE forum software is better? phpbb, smf, mybb, vanilla? (only answer if you are using it)

We don't have a forum, but I have used phpbb and SMF and I like SMF the most, I used it with TinyPortal and was great.

Cheers !

1. Don't have a forum if you don't have a large customer base. Your forums will only be dead, and this will steer people away. It is better to not have a forum than to have an inactive one.

2. Don't do it. I don't know of any company that uses it as a support medium. It's ok for basic questions, but, its always better to open a ticket (for tracking purposes) than to do it through the forum.

3. That is a good idea, but, not constantly. Only when you want to let people know about updates with your company.

4. That all depends on how you are set up. Make sure you trust anyone you allow access to post, but, I would recommend you keep it within upper management. No more than 1 or 2 more people.

5. This would be a good idea, but, most users will not read your blog let alone comment on it. It may be better to disable comments (SPAM is really annoying).

6. Using free forum software on a professional hosting business is tacky and will drive people away faster than a skunk. If your going to have a forum, shell out the money for VB. If you really want to use free software, I prefer SMF over all of those. Plenty of already made modules and templates, easily customizable, the RC 2.0 has a great user and admin interface. It's pretty secure (more so than PHPBB) and more robust (IMO) than any others. I tested MyBB about a month or 2 ago and deleted it within 7 days. I hate it to be honest.

In my case, I use a forum as an offsite status page. Basically, if I have any problems, they can go to the forum for any news.

For software, I really like MyBB.

You could make the forum visible only to customers to begin with, then make it public when it builds up some steam. :)

A news page and possibly a ticket system hosted on another network is always a wise idea though to keep in touch with your customers in the event that your own servers become unreachable.

You could make the forum visible only to customers to begin with, then make it public when it builds up some steam. :)

A news page and possibly a ticket system hosted on another network is always a wise idea though to keep in touch with your customers in the event that your own servers become unreachable.


That is actually a good idea.
I can buy vbulletin and that is not a problem but for a start, I think why not just use free script like phpbb or smf and then when the community grow bigger, move to vbulletin.

Forums can be helpful if you have a larger client base that will actually use them, in addition to having enough staff members to monitor the forums.

Take into consideration your typical clientele as well. For example, if you are a game server host, your clients are more likely to use a forum as a support method than say local small business.