Online Community That You Control
Manage your brand, the tone, and the content of your user community
We manage a forum that’s been around longer than Facebook, and we have managed it since its humble beginnings back in 2002. Since then we have started and maintained forums for businesses as well.
When you hire us for your forum hosting needs, you are benefit from our experience.
Managing "your" community on a platform you do not control is an exercise in frustration
You know the community sites we’re talking about:
- No control over branding
- Unable to ban bad actors
- Scammers keep coming back and abusing your users
- Special software required to access "your" site
- You can lose "your" site at any time, for any or no reason, without recourse
What you need is an online forum
- Match the site to your brand
- Have the site live on your own domain name for increased credibility
- Your Staff
- Your policies and rules enforced
- Impersonation is impossible
- Content is well categorized
- Content is searchable
- The site grows in value over time
- Make your users feel heard
Communities aren't as cookie-cutter as normal web sites
Our preference is for Xenforo server software, but that is not a requirement, and everything beyond that really depends on your vision for your community, and its scope.
We can customize everything to make sure your forum starts in the most fertile ground possible.
- Are you starting from scratch, or are you bringing a community with millions of members to our hosting? What does your marketing plan look like, and how big do you want to grow? Do you want a package that sizes for that future growth now, or would you rather endure a couple of hours of downtime to migrate to a larger host later if you succeed, but pay less month-to-month now?
- Will the community need to be integrated with your existing web sites? Will that just be in appearance, or will coding need to be done to tie sites together using APIs for increased functionality?
- Is LiteSpeed going to work for you? Do you have an nginx web configuration that works that you’d prefer to use? Do you need the flexibility of Apache instead?
- Maybe you want to continue to use Centminmod to host your sites on a VPS we set up, rather than have your site sit on our default software?
- Do you have so much content that you require a dedicated Elasticsearch server?
- Will you need our help setting up and managing the site day-to-day, or do you just want us to manage the software, or do you want to manage everything once we set up the technical base for you including moderation?
- Are you a hobbyist community and you’d rather pay for hosting with a share of your ad space, rather than fixed monthly costs?
The only standard sites are those that are just starting out. Packages don’t make a ton of sense if you’re building a successful community. For instance, that community we referenced that’s been running since 2002 has over ten million posts and a quarter million users. That’s a lot of data that’s indexed by search engines, and that means a server with more memory and database performance than you will likely need with your new support forum. But we can do it if you need it, and you will never outgrow us.
Reach out and tell us what you need and we can come up with a quote. Rest assured that you will be contacted by someone with a technical background, and not a salesman.
With custom quotes, our underlying goal is to make sure our goals are aligned. We want to succeed because we are helping you to succeed.