As many of you are aware, the Internet is now bloated with companies offering free phpBB forum hosting. But why? The answer is simple - to make money. For many webmasters, the Internet has one purpose - to generate revenue. This is perfectly understandable as this can be some persons main and even only job. The idea of this article is to make you aware of free phpBB forum hosting, what you should look for in a host and why free forum hosting is not really a bad thing at all. I used to think that free phpBB forum hosts are unreliable, feature limited and unstable. Whilst the feature limited part is to some extent true, many efficient phpBB forum hosts extend their functionality which makes up for the lack of features to begin with.

For a person willing to setup a community who has no webmaster experience, wants a simple control panel to manage their community the market niche “free phpBB hosting” suits them perfectly. For new users, free phpBB hosting is the way to go, but firstly you should do research before signing up with a host. Some hosts are out there to purely make money and dont care about the customer service they give to their clients, whilst others provide brilliant support whilst making money from some marketing techniques I shall be talking about later. You are always better to choose a host which is community focused and does not just have the intent of making money by “placing this advert here”.

You probably have the idea by now that there are plenty of hosts available, of which all offer different features. The key features you should look for in a host are;

1. The core phpBB features which come integrated with the standard phpBB software.
2. Reliable support team available to assist you with any issues or problems you have.
3. A community focused company. These websites tend to perform much better.
4. Ensure the company hosts your website on a reliable server in a decent datacenter.
5. Look for unique features that host provides. This often beats one host over another.

If you compare the five factors about free phpBB hosting above, you are likely to find a very good host. If the host does not have support, do not use it. End of story. If you are unsure about any of the factors above, contact the host and ask them. Any decent host should be happy to discuss pre sale/signup questions with them. If they seem problematic, I can tell that you wont have difficulty telling them to stick it where the sun does not shine. Another important aspect you should look for is unique features the hosts provide. Anybody can install a multiforum script, but hosts that are more serious about their service (which is a good thing) will provide unique features - and these are always usefull.

Lastly, please remember that if you find a decent host, the service they providing are free. Imagine your forum, plus hundreds of thousands of others! Thats a lot of server maintenance. Therefore, please bear in mind they need to make money somehow to keep the server(s) running successfully (otherwise your forum would die!). Forum hosts usually use contextual advertising such as Google Adsense to provide some form of income. Hosts with unique features should provide the facility to pay a one time only fee which will remove advertisements from your forum. Another scheme free phpbb forum hosts use are affiliate schemes and links in footer of your free forum. As there are hundreds of thousands of pages on a free forum host, it makes a great opportunity for advertisers to advertise on their website in relation to keyword optimisation.

To conclude, look for hosts which are community based. Do not choose a host based on adverts. It doesn’t work like that.

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