I built it. It actually cost me a lot less than £300. I''ve probably spent a bit over £200 total including three lots of monthly server + license costs at $30 per month. That monthly expense will rise with the database size and (hopefully) traffic. Some of that cost relates to third party code which I''ve paid for and have yet to even use. And including £25 in facebook ads, which proved a waste of money. But I''ve put a serious number of hours into it. And that''s my true cost, because I could have made a lot of money with those hours if I''d invested them in my business rather than my hobby site, and I''m now playing catch up. Somebody is getting paid every month for those hours at Archant. It did only take a couple of days to set up and get populated, but I''ve done a lot of stuff since then - such as the custom forum icons and the member map, so that probably isn''t a fair reflection of the time invested. You don''t need much "technical knowhow, financial clout and resources" to simply download and install forum software to a server, and then mess around with a stylesheet to change the colours and customise the design a little. I elected to go with a decent paid cloud hosted option because I need more than just a forum, but a complete CMS (content management system) to build out the site, and because I get a free upgrade to IP board 4.0 when it is ready (which is what I really wanted from the start). The Pink''un only need a forum, the rest of their site uses a different CMS. But there is also some decent free open source software which Archant could use. Presumably their server costs would remain fairly constant, so in terms of their outlay it could be as little as £0.00 + whatever they pay their technical bloke, who if an employee would be getting paid already. So perhaps as little £0.00 additional cost to their business. Simple Machines is completely free software. This forum uses Simple Machines and does all the stuff you expect to see on a forum: http://www.mk5golfgti.co.uk/forum/ phpBB 3 is free and open source. Here is an example of a site running that: http://forums.gameservers.com/ Although don''t discount my "knowhow" completely, I once built and managed a site which saw just shy of 1 million hits a month for almost two years, I''m no coder but I''m not strictly an amateur when it comes to building and managing sites. Neither am I an expert. The challenge that the Pink''un have after they have installed their software (looks like it is going here on this subdomain http://forums.pinkun.com/default.html) is migrating all posts from this forum to the new one. That is a massive headache. I don''t actually know what software are using for this forum right now, but because it is so old any new software may not have a tool to quickly and easily migrate content from this forum to their new one. Of course, if the Pink''un haven''t even started their new forum and need a helping hand.... they can always throw me a couple of hundred quid and give me a few days, and I''ll build it for them. Not sure I''d be able to migrate 1.5 million posts from this one to that one though, and that may be the stumbling block. If there isn''t a way to push a button to do it then that may require somebody to custom code a program to import/export.
