Forum hosting: Free vs Paid

So you want to open a forum but have only limited
experience with such things.

Well you have two basic choices, an ad supported free
forum such as ProBoards, Invisionfree, or SMFforFree.
Or you can use you own hosting account and install the
forum script of you choice such as vBulliten, SMF, or PHPBB.

Some pros and cons of both...

Ad supported free forums:

Pros:
1) It's free! (duh!)

2)They're pretty much fire and forget. By this I mean, once you
set up the account all you have to do is decide how many categories
and forums you want and decide on a theme for it. No need to
worry about backing up the database or any other major maintenance.

Cons:
1) If the company hosting it goes out of business you're sunk.

2) You get to look at ugly ads that are placed as in-your-face
as you can get.
(Firefox with Adblock Plus usually fixes this but not everyone uses FF)

3) You have to work within the host's TOS and a lot of times they
can be awfully picky about the content you can post.

4) Some people tend to (wrongly) look down their noses
at free hosted forums

Hosting it yourself:

Pros:
1) You have full control over the forum and you're the boss.

1a) If your host offers Fantastico or other similar one click script
installers, installing the forum can take only a matter of minutes.

2) It is under your domain name, so if you have a store on
the same site it can give your customers a place to ask questions
or leave you feed back to tell you what works and what doesn't

3) You have greater control over the look and feel of the forum.

Cons:
1) You gotta pay the bills for the upkeep.

2) You're stuck with making sure you have back ups and doing
the needed maintenance. (ICK!)

3) You get to look at ugly ads you put there yourself.
(j/k Well, sorta...)

Advice for the aspiring Webmaster

So you've been on the internet for a while now.
You've surfed, searched, maybe even posted on
forums and just maybe even made a couple of
bucks selling stuff on eBay or even Amazon.

Now you have come to the point where you
have a twinkle in your eye and the desire to
make your own site and claim your own little
chunk of bandwidth and disk space on the 'net
but you realize one tiny little problem, you don't
have a clue where to start!

I've been on the net since the late 90's and I've
done and seen quite a bit in that time. I'm not
going to claim I have all the answers, I don't.
But I can offer you a few pieces of hard earned
advice...

1) There ain't no such thing as a stupid question.
All of us start out the exact same way, utterly
ignorant of what a WYSIWYG editor is, or what
an FTP client is, let alone what they're for.

Ask questions no matter how silly you think they are.
Anyone that laughs or mocks you doesn't merit your
attention.

2) Expect to spend long hours pouring over pages and
pages of Geek Speek.
A lot programmers and coders write manuals for other
geeks not us poor dumb bunnies that just want to build
a site and maybe even a small online home business. And
for this, I refer you to point 1.

When in doubt, ask.

3) Don't stress over not getting a lot of traffic for the
first year or so.
Most of your traffic will likely be friends and family or
If you've sold stuff online and had repeat customers
they might take a look at your new store to see if you have
anything they might want. Other than that the search
engine's bots will take their dear sweet time crawling
your site and the engines will take their dear sweet time
in getting off their butt's and putting you into their search
results.

4) Being a Webmaster is an art, not an exact science.
In four years, I've gone from a thumb fingered forum
poster, and small time eBay seller, that had only a nodding
acquaintance with punctuation to an "accomplished"
Webmaster. Have I mastered it yet? (ROFLMACO) Nope.
Every time I log in I learn something new...

and I still ask "stupid" questions.