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It usually depends on what you really need and what you want to achieve. There are advantages and disadvantages for each and everything so do both paid and as well as free web hosting have.

Free Web Hosting

Advantages:

- The most obvious benefit is that it’s free.

- You can use your free web space to practice programming. Not many, but there are some free web hosting plans that support a programming language such as PHP, ASP, CGI/Perl, Coldfusion or JSP.

- A free web hosting plan is good for creating a personal website.

Disadvantages:

- A free web hosts usually place their banner and text ads on your website.

- With a large number of free hosts, your website is placed in a sub-domain or a folder (www.yourwebsite.freehosting.com or www.freehosting.com/yourwebsite) which usually results in poor search engine rankings.

- As they are offering free hosting, lots of free web hosts are not able to offer 24/7 or any support.

- Very few free web hosts offer a control panel with their plans.

- Another drawback with free web hosts is many don’t allow FTP access which is an problem if you have many files to upload.

- Free web hosting plans does not offer much disk space or data transfer. This could be a problem if you have a lot of bigger files or if your website generates a lot of traffic.

Paid Web Hosting

Advantages:

- With paid hosting, you will now have any unwanted text or banner ads placed on your website.

- Your website will not be placed in a sub-domain or folder. You will have your own domain name (yourwebsite.com) which will not only have better search engine rankings but it will also looks more professional.

- Most paid web hosts offer 24/7 support.

- Many paid web hosting plans comes with a control panel such as cPanel, Vdeck, Plesk or Ensim which is having the features like web stats, the ability to password protect directories, and you can also create web based email accounts.

- Most paid web hosts offer FTP access.

- Usually, all the paid web hosting plans support lots of programming languages like PHP, ASP, CGI/Perl, Coldfusion and JSP.

- With the more disk space and data transfer you get with paid hosting, you can add more files to your website and it is having the ability to handle more traffic.

Disadvantages:

- The only disadvantage here is that it’s not free.

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As we all know that PhpBB is an open source software and con be downloaded for free and because of this almost all the webmasters like to use this software to run their online communities and the only thing we need to make sure is that the software works seamlessly with the web hosting service provider. Here are some of the points which can help you to  choose a compatible host for PhpBB.

1) Linux Hosting

Since the software is written in PHP, it’s best that you choose Linux hosting. Windows servers can also run PHP scripts, but some features do not run in a Windows environment (e.g. mod rewrite). Mod rewrite is important for SEO purposes.

2) cPanel Control Panel

Usually Linux servers comes with free cPanel admin control panel so once you are having access to the control panel, you just need to login and install the PhpBB script. Cpanel is also having a useful feature like Fantastico which helps you to install the forum in just couple of min. It is having an easy to use installation wizard which helps you to promote, guide and assist with the entire installation procedure.

3) Hosting Space and Bandwidth

Today, the hosting industry has become pretty much competitive and there are many web hosts who can give unlimited hosting space and bandwidth on shared hosting plans. Normally, if you run static sites on this plan, you will not face any problem but if you want to run a forum, your site may eventually end up hogging too much resources.

The only thing that creates problem with running a forum is that the number of users will keep on improving as per time and because there will be lots of users connecting to the server, the number of requests that are sent to the server will be dramatically increased and sometimes this may slowdown the server. If the same thing happens on lots of times then other users who are sharing the same server with you may start to complain and at the end, your hosting account may get suspended temporarily.

So to avoid your hosting account from getting disrupted, just make sure that you plan for the growth of your site. If you feel like your site is growing rapidly, plan to migrate the site to more stable environment. Instead of hosting the site on a shared hosting plan, go for a VPS Hosting package. As if you go with a VPS plan, you get all dedicated server resources and admin rights. You can continue with shared plans if you are not having more than 2000 members but if there are more than 2000 members, you will have to go for a VPS hosting or Dedicated Servers Hosting.

I agree that VPS Hosting and Dedicated servers cost a lot if compared to shared server hosting so if you are starting a brand new forum, it is a wise decision to setup the forum on shared server for the first 6 months or so. As the time grows and members as well, you will need to switch over the plan to VPS Hosting or Dedicated Servers.

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