Proboards

Having operated a couple of forums that crashed in the past, when I decided to start a new forum, I first looked for something where the software end of it could be managed by someone else, so that I could concentrate on forum categories, threads, posts, and members, all without having to worry about updates and technical problems.

Some of of paid forum scripts included managed hosting plans, but they were all too expensive for my tastes. Although the entry level hosted programs were reasonable, they were geared for forums that were profit-driven, so that, as a forum became more popular, the costs went up proportionately.

On the other hand, like most forum administrators, I hoped that my forum would become popular, but I didn't plan on making any money out of it, so I would be faced with a situation where, if my forum were to succeed, I would no longer be able to afford it.

Then I looked at ProBoards. With ProBoards, you could begin with a free plan that looked pretty good, in itself, and there was also a paid plan that would provide more of the bells and whistles that a forum administrator could migrate to at some point, if that made sense. Even the paid plan appeared to be reasonably priced.

I started a forum on ProBoards, using their free plan. I loved it. From the admin side, even the free plan had a lot to offer by way of configuration. Modifications were easily made from the backend, and ProBoards took care of all of the updates, and hosted the forum.

That went well for about a year. Then there was a day when no one, including myself, could log in. Instead, there was a notice about having exceeded my bandwidth limitations. These bandwidth limitations were not made clear at sign up, by the way. In fact, their advertising said, and still says:

Unlimited members, unlimited threads, unlimited size! Build the discussion forum of your dreams with ProBoards' award-winning free forum hosting service.

Without going for the fully paid plan, there were paid options to up my allowed bandwidth by degrees, so I did that. My forum was quickly restored. A couple of days later, I had exceeded my new bandwidth amounts, and they had taken it down again.

My membership had risen gradually, but there had been no sudden or dramatic increase in the number of people who were in the forum at any given time. There had been no dramatic rise in my forum activity.

Unlike a regular hosting plan, I couldn't go in and see what was going on. After a succession of emails back and forth, they finally told me what had happened. The forum had been hit by a DDOS attack, such as we see here from time to time. My allowed bandwidth had been exceeded by a bunch of Chinese bots, and their bandwidth limitation policies made no allowances for that.

Since they were hosting it, there were no steps that I could take to protect against a DDOS attacks, and they were weren't particularly interested in doing so because their customers were paying to up their bandwidth in order to accommodate Chinese bots that contributed nothing to their forum,

The next thing that I hadn't seen in the small print was that they provided no database access, so I couldn't simply buy another forum software and hosting plan, and migrate my forum data to a new home. My only options were to sign up for their paid hosting plan, with a minimum one-year contract, or shut the forum down.

The paid hosting plan allowed for significantly more bandwidth than the free plan, but still offered no protection from DDOS attacks, and there would still be limitations on the amount of bandwidth that I would be allowed. So under their paid hosting plan, I would have to obligate myself for one year of hosting, and they would still shut it down if it were under a DDOS attack if I couldn't pay the overage charges.

Although I was concerned, my forum was doing well and I liked the software, so I signed up for a one-year plan. Under the new plan, they wouldn't shut my forum down if I exceeded the bandwidth allowances, but they would charge me for the overage.

A month later, I received a monthly bill from them for more than $2,000.

I was able to get them to drop the $2,000 bill but they insisted that they would have to charge for any subsequent overages. I shut the forum down, but still had to pay for one year of hosting that I wasn't using.

Even under a regular hosting plan, there are limitations to the amount of bandwidth that can be used. Even with the ones that advertise unlimited bandwidth, there is small print somewhere that will shut you down if you take up too many of their resources. In other words, you can't buy a $5 per month hosting plan and use it to compete with Facebook, regardless of how many times they have used the word "unlimited."

However, most -- not all - hosting plans will make allowances for things that are not under your control, such as DDOS attacks, and every hosting plan that I have ever used (other than ProBoards) will take steps to protect against it, some more effectively than others.

Although a DDOS attack will cause slowdowns and other problems here, and might even result in some people being unable to access the forum for short periods of time, once my hosting company's tech support become aware of it, they will move us to another server or take other steps to ward against the attack.

ProBoards will just charge you as much as they can get from you, and then shut your down anyhow.

 

With a hosting plan, like I have here, I can go view IP addresses if I want to. When I see that we have a hundred guests or more, I will usually find that most of them are from the same IP address range, which might indicate either an automated hacking attempt or the beginning of a DDOS attack. I can then block the entire range of IPs or individual IP addresses from accessing the forum, whether they sign in or not. Often that stops whatever it was that was about to take place.

On PCBoard, I didn't have access to any of that, so they could be running their own bot against my forum and charging me for it, for all I knew. I trust that they weren't, but there would be nothing to prevent it, or maybe upping the bandwidth just enough to put people into the overages, but not so much that they won't pay.

I subscribe to an anti-spam program here that will flag IP addresses that have been reported as spammers. When someone from a reported address tries to create an account, it is put on hold until I review it. The same is true when I click on an IP number when I am looking to see why we have so many guests. If the IP address has been reported as a spammer, or a hacking account, I can block it.

Years ago, Internet Service Providers would randomly assign an IP address when a client logged onto the Internet, so you would have a different IP address each time you went online, although within the same range of addresses. Today, pretty much everyone has a static IP address so every time you are on the Internet, you are using the same IP address, unless you change providers or are logging in from a hotel WiFi or hotspot or something.

That doesn't tell me who you are, but if you spam one forum and the administrator reports it, you might be blocked from joining another forum.