Is Hosting a want or need for your site? what I mean is does your site need paid hosting? Or could it do well with free hosting? Meaning is it a want or a need?
I guess it all depends on what your community wants, e.g. if your on a free forum host, and suddenly your community may desire a load of mods that your free host does not offer, you may consider a move to free or paid advanced hosting to bring those features to your community.
Paid hosting for us was definitely a need. Because I used to be on ProPHPBB at one time, and we've gotten lots of requests, almost half of which we've had to refuse because the host wouldn't add them because they wouldn't benefit all forums hosted with them. So in 99 cases out of 100, if you want to be able to add any feature you and your members want/need, paid hosting is definitely the way to go. I would not go back to the limitations of free hosting for anything at this stage.
Paid hosting is an absolute must. Free hosting is usually unreliable, they can take your site down for dumb reasons, and ~$10/mo isn't exactly a fortune.
An absolute must need for my site. I need full control to take advantage of my forum software. I was actually using phpBB at one point and my members did not like it. I made the move to IPB and after a few months, I can see how well it is paying off. Don't forget about SEO. If you're planning on creating a behemoth of a site that expects at least half a million hits per month, you'll need your own domain and server for sure.
I would definitely say Paid Hosting is a must. As long as you plan on having a good active site, then you need paid hosting.
Yes, its mostly needed if your site is very active, and grows. So you need that freedom which paid hosting gives you.
Yeah, i guess that was an inaccurate comment, but you are correct. There aren't very many big forums from free hosts.
Again, I'm going say it all depends on what your community wants, if your community desire lots of mods and you have the money & experience to go with paid hosting, then do it but if your happy on your current free forum set up, then why move?
It's a need. I don't think you can find any decent free hosts out there, and you'd be running into downtime issues and speed issues on many free hosts. Needless to say, I don't want to be running my paid software on a free host which may shut down the next day. There is an added sense of security with paid hosts as you are in a contract.
