Self-hosting vs Free Hosted forums

I'm not singling specific people out in any way shape or form. I'm merely stating that this is an attitude that I've just seen crop up a lot when it comes to paid hosting. (Not so much within roleplay communities, but definitely within other communities. Especially promotion-type sites.) And it bothers me a bit. This whole idea that if you aren't spending money on your forum then you aren't doing it "right". (Because there is totally only one right way to have a successful site...)
And especially when I can't count the number of times I've seen people condemn free hosts and praise self hosting only for their site to die or close or otherwise be rendered offline because they forgot to pay for a DNS registration or costs got out of hand or they exceeded CPU limits or etc...

 

Self-hosting. I can't stand free forums anymore. They're ridiculously restrictive and we could never make Risk look the way it does now on a free forum. It would be impossible, because you have to get into the php and all that. Plus I find it's just plain <i>easy</i> when it comes to self-hosting. I could never go back.

 

Nah, I think I know what you mean. :/ To be honest, we only pay for hosting and a cbox and the hosting is actually something my fiance has been doing for 10+ years now because of his line of work... So adding my forums doesn't actually cost us anything we wouldn't be paying if I didn't have a roleplay forum. I don't look down on sites that are free-hosted and I believe you're correct that it doesn't matter WHAT a person is hosted on, they can still run a successful site regardless.

Free host, paid host, that shouldn't even matter as a player. For me, as I said, it's just a matter of me being impatient (when I want to get something done, it irritates me irrationally when I can't get it done the MINUTE I want to get it done! Haha...) and being a lazy control freak. So as an admin, I don't like free hosts but it's not really something that effects my decision to join a site and I wish it wasn't something effected the average RPer's choice to join a site (as free sites do seem to gain more members because their software is more widely used amongst the RP population). So I admit, on occasion, I do sound bitter because of that. Self hosted sites have barriers, too, like the "this software ONLY" messages and the people who say things like "I'll never join so-and-so software because I don't know it."

 

Thiiiiiis. I have encountered so many free-host sites that have way more members than I generally see on a self-host site. And sometimes I don't understand why because the skin or the orginization drives me up a wall and it's over all just very frustrating. I do find a lot of sites, especially free-host that are almost prejudiced against any forum that's not their own software or something they know how to work. They won't even let you affiliate if you're not running a certain type of software.

 

I can't say I've ever seen a site refuse affiliation based on software... It doesn't surprise me though. Not considering that whole ad-forum crap of "only <software x> can post here". (Which again, I don't understand. Why even bother to pick certain software? I mean if a skin/theme designer is good enough they can make proboards look like phpBB and/or MyBB look like InvisionFree. At the end of the day for members, every forum software functions pretty much exactly the same. It has a reply button and a post window. Beyond that is just bonus.)

 

Except for Nova 2/ sms.

That really is different from a forum. We still attracted more than 50 people who signed up over the years. Despite not advertising on forums, because we don't do that whole 'link back thing', and only using 2-4 directories, sparingly. It may not be much in terms of forum rp sites that can draw on larger communities, but I am still happy with it. Wouldnt change to a forum for anything.

 

Self-hosting all the way if you can swing it. Seeing a .jcink or somesuch in the url of a forum just categorizes it as another throwaway RPG, in my mind. I know that's a massive generalization and there are some great, quality ones out there, but getting your own host is not that difficult, and if you plan on being around for more than a few months it's worth the token amount of time you need to invest.

 

Self-hosting is a lot more in-depth though (like I mentioned here). Not everyone has the time, technical skills or commitment level to do it. Plus financial situation can also factor in. I mean not everyone can (or wants to) spend a lot of money on their hobby.

 

@VirusZero I guess I just think that, if you can't make the initial effort then chances are good that you're not invested enough in your RPG idea to keep it running long enough to make it worth it. For the members or yourself. So many RPGs die out in the first few months, even ones that have had massive amounts of time invested into their creation. Keeping an RPG running is not easy. But getting some free forum software, unzipping it, and clicking next until it's done, is easy. I was brand new to forum installation when I launched my site - I literally had to figure out how to install mods and skins, as previously I'd had a friend do all of that for me when I ran an RPG before. But it still took me less than an hour to figure out, using google to overcome the obstacles ("zomg what's an FTP? Is this part important or can I ignore it?")

The financial thing I can understand. But I think for a lot of folks it's simply that the idea of installing their own forum is rather intimidating, rather than the reality of it. I can sympathise with that as well, I expected it to be a lot harder. But it's really very easy to get a basic forum up and running. Obviously if you want your forum to do more advanced stuff it's not going to be easy, but that makes no difference whether you're on a free forum or not.

 

Just because someone doesn't want to self-host doesn't mean they aren't dedicated to their site though. Dedication can take more forms than simply paying for web space. (Since I've seen plenty of people espouse that self-hosted is the only way to go but none of them could keep their sites open for more than 2-3 months either.)

The main problem is that the admin is not dedicated enough. It doesn't honestly matter whether they're on paid hosting or not.


To be fair, getting a site installed though is largely the easy part (even if you don't use something like softaculous to do the install for you, manual installation is pretty easy for anyone who has google, time and patience). Afterwards is where the hard parts start. (Designing your own theme, installing all plugins if you need to edit the PHP, remembering to take a lot of backups, etc...)

And the hardest part of all is the maintaining aspect of the site... advertising, getting new members, handling any disputes and/or issues between players, keeping the site fresh and updated and exciting for new and old members alike. (Which is why so many admins fail, they can't handle this aspect of running a site.)

 

Damn, I've done it all... free, self and piggy back.

Would never do free or piggy back again. The first is too restricting the second is far too risky. We lost our database (SQL errors, so the back ups were messed as well) on our two piggy back hosters who knew... far too little to be hosters tbh.

Self hosting is such a freeing experience. With IPS just a ticket away (and they are fast to reply and AWESOME!) and the IPS forums and mods and developers awesome too I get to focus on my creativity. I understand others don't need these things to be sorted for them, but I do so... I pay for it and am happy to. :D Share the wealth I say.

 

Self-hosting is wonderful and empowering. You can change your forum software if you need to and the ability to use the ecosystem of add-ons/extensions is huge. As others have said, once you self-host you will probably never want to return to the restrictions of mass-hosted forums. It's like the difference between an old voice-only phone and a new cellphone with internet access. Once you got it, it'll reset your standards.

 

I've never played on a forum, most of my experience has been on Nova, though I've done my time on real play by email and live journal (weird, frustrating, and oddly fluid). I have heard too many horror stories with free hosted Nova games, and it's just so easy to install yourself, I wouldn't dream of anything but self hosting. The only time I've seen any degree of success with group hosting for Nova has been in fleets, but I find fleet politics too distracting from the rp. I won't do it anymore.

However, I absolutely understand some people just don't have the money, want, or the skill to self host. I just recommend they make sure they have access to back up their own database, or verification that they can trust their host is backing up for them regularly and you save that backup just as regularly... Just in case. Even paid hosts have been known to go poof in the night from time to time, but free hosts and cms providers (forum, Nova, word press, whatever) are more prone to do it with no notice.

 

I joined two sites that I'm now an Admin on, before creating the sister site, and they are all self-hosted. When I started, there was a lot of pride about it being a "self-hosted" site, and a lot of resentment towards free hosting... which I think was mainly due to a couple of bad experiences with certain free hosted sites. Since then though, the original founder has another site with jcink.

I do prefer self-hosted to be honest, just because I got into coding with the first two sites and have since acted as the site programmer, which is something I absolutely love. So the freedom to make the site look entirely like you want without having to pay for premium additions and restrictions is something that really makes me lean toward self-hosted. Plus the chance to code little pages to learn new things (I used flexbox recently and got super excited - no one understood why)

 

I know this feeling. Our hosting service (Dreamhost) recently integrated the automated set up of Let's Encrypt certificates for free, so I added it to our site... And I'm pretty sure everyone was secretly rolling their eyes at me for how excited I was over figuring out how to make the site automagically put everyone on the secure connection, and only the secure connection.

It's the little things.

 

Good man. Every site that has a user login system should be using HTTPS (kudos to RPGfix for already implementing this here). I too am on Dreamhost and it was wonderful how Dreamhost made it so easy for us.

 

I'm female. My xo may pop in from time to time, but I don't think the forums will be his thing.

As for the Let's Encrypt certificates, yes, I am very pleased that Dreamhost set that up so easy to use. It directly competes with the sales of their own certificates, but part of the reason I stick with them despite some bumps in the road is that they generally seem to see the big picture and tend to land on the correct side of things like this.

 

We use self hosting as well but I've been on a site so completely downgraded in its code that I wish it had been free hosted because at least then it wouldn't be buggy and half the time not want to work. (It had 10+ year old code on it) I say as long as your lead coder has time to do his/her thing then more power to you but if you don't have the time nor energy to put into keeping your code nice and working perhaps go free. I would rather join a free-hosted over self-hosting if it were the case of old code. However, I judge it more on the community and the staff if they are friendly.


I don't know a lot about our host since that is under our lead coder but I do know this is our pretty nifty menu and I loveeee it.

 

I much prefer self-hosting, but I do web design for a living, so coding is easy for me. Plus, I already have my own server space to use as a playground.

In general, I'd say self-hosting if you have the time/ability to do it, but there's nothing wrong with free hosts. I just don't think you can get the level of customization with a free host. At least, not the way I like to customize things. :)