Questions about hosting a forum?

[richiezh]

I have been using x10hosting for quite a long time, and I am currently have a personal blog hosted on the site. I would like to host a second site on my account, as I have one remaining addon domain spot available. But this site will be a forum/community project, similar to the official x10hosting community or... Reddit.

I am wondering if this is even allowed. My forum will be mostly text based as I will require that users use a service like imgur or dropbox to host their images. I don't think my forum will strain the server too much as I do not anticipate much activity when the forum first launches. And if activity does ramp up, I will have (hopefully) have enough ad revenue to move it to a paid hosting server.

I did not find anything on the TOS that restricts this, so is my idea allowed to be hosted on this service?

Also what is the MySQL situation? Is there a limit to the number of tables contained in one database? Size limit?

 

[essellar]

It certainly is allowed - and a large number of Free Hosting sites are built around forums. Just be aware that depending on your forum software and the nature of the content, you might run into problems with 403 (forbidden) errors for a while until mod_security rules are adjusted (if they can be without opening too many holes), so there may be some extra support issues to file while you're winding up. Oh, and remember that you are responsible for any user-generated content, so you'll need to keep it well-moderated (staff here won't expect you to be watching incoming postings in real time or anything, but don't let any TOS-violating stuff sit too long).

As for the MySQL, it just counts as disk space used. If you are not yet on unmetered, you will probably need to ask for an upgrade at some point.

 

[richiezh]

It certainly is allowed - and a large number of Free Hosting sites are built around forums. Just be aware that depending on your forum software and the nature of the content, you might run into problems with 403 (forbidden) errors for a while until mod_security rules are adjusted (if they can be without opening too many holes), so there may be some extra support issues to file while you're winding up. Oh, and remember that you are responsible for any user-generated content, so you'll need to keep it well-moderated (staff here won't expect you to be watching incoming postings in real time or anything, but don't let any TOS-violating stuff sit too long).

As for the MySQL, it just counts as disk space used. If you are not yet on unmetered, you will probably need to ask for an upgrade at some point.

Thanks for the info! I plan to write the code for the forum myself, hopefully I won't run into too much trouble.

 

[dragocra]

Rather than writing it yourself, Weebly actually has a pretty nice forum that works great on X10's free plan (just make a website, add the forum, and download an archive of your site to get the code).

 

[caftpx10]

Personally, I find it safer to code it completely as you would know how it works completely and can easily solve any problems that arise, like for instance security.