I've been thinking about offering IP.Board 3 hosting. I would be leasing my owned licenses to my customers or they could use their own. Does anybody have any experiences with this? Doesn't seem like a lot of host do it and thats why I'm interested in the market.

It may be that a lot of hosts don't do it because subleasing your license may be against the terms for it. You might wish to discuss this with the script/forum author before proceeding.

I already have been researching this. Invision Power does allow this, while vBulletin does not. You are just not allowed to sell the licenses individually. I'm currently in talks with Invision Power.

If its something good, you should be keeping it as your own idea for as long as possible before others start so steal your niche :)

thats the idea :), but I got some things up my sleeve just in case. Thanks for the replies!

I feel the main reason why many hosts shy away from forum hosting of this kind is due to the vast quantities of spam that many unmonitored forums receive.

I recall when I was a host I hosted a friends forum, while he was away on holiday the forum was discovered by some porn spam-bot, this literally inundated his pages with pictures and links. I suspended his forum for obvious reasons, but by the time he returned and had the opportunity to clean the forum up, the amount of time needed to remove everything was not worth the hassle.

I commend you for the idea of bringing forums back into the mainstay, however a few issues as mentioned above, coupled with formal complaints to your data centre could risk everything for you.


Best regards
Arran Wood

P.S. If you do get it up and running, I have an offer that could earn the forum owner (or you as part of the TOS) an extra $52 per year, per forum.

Is this free forum hosting? Or paid.
Buy that I mean are you offering ad suported forums on subdomains like many sites do, or offering a hosting service purly focused at IVPB and giving lisences to customers to use on your server?