I am interested in setting up a website that will primarily be used as a discussion forum. I would like to have a message board and chat room and use Frontpage 2000 to create my site. I have no experience with hosting companies and would appreciate any input as to what companies or technical requirements would be best for this type of site.
Thank you.
Chris

The technical requirements are simple enough. Basically, you need access to the cgi-bin directory (or yuour own) if your program is Perl based (either a .pl or .cgi extension). Since you're using Front Page (Macromedia's Dreamweaver is a much better product), you'll need Front Page extensions on the server, which many already have.

Where you have to do your research is finding a host that won't cripple your account if your forum is popular and starts using more than what they consider your fair share of resources (see my experiences with AIT in another thread). A solution could be a shared server with a limited number of domains on it. You pay more for it, but at least your site will likely continue without interruption. Discussion forums can take up a fair amount of disk space and use a large amount of other resources, including cpu cycles.

Don't believe the "unlimited" claims many companies make. Most don't really mean it and you'll find that out the hard way when they shut you down or charge you a lot more, or both.

If you are not expecting an incredibley large amount of traffic, I would suggest www.npsis.com (http://www.npsis.com) .. it's only $8 a month and they have excellent tech support... the down side is that they only offer 500 mb of transfer a month (which is enough for most moderate traffic sites). If you are expecting a high volume of traffic, try www.linuxwebhost.com (http://www.linuxwebhost.com) ... they are also only $8 a month and have 3 gigs of transfer /month for you to play with. The good thing about this company is their control panel, which allows you to do all your cgi file extracting and directory protections with ease. The down side for these guys is their tech support ... it will be either non-existent or very slow. So if your new to the game, I would suggest going with npsis.com, and if you end up with too much traffic, they have a month to month contract so you can just switch to linuxwebhost.com no problem.

Hope this helps =)

-Esper