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Thinking about starting another forum for the low end VPS community, and in need of some ideas
Nope, I am NOT trying to compete with LET nor steal any of LET's traffic.
As some of you probably know, I have a tiny blog that I write reviews for low end VPS products during my spare time, at the moment I am thinking of starting a forum as a sister site for my blog, WITHOUT making it a replica of any sort to LET.
I have put up a few questions and if you have any ideas that you would like to contribute, feel free to comment them here or comment on this page: http://www.96mb.com/forum/
Many thanks in advance!
Comments
How many followers do you have on your blog? If you have followers then yes go for it. But if you don't then it will just be another ehhh forum.
@PytoHost: Can I count you as one?
Jokes aside, here is the current visitor stats I pulled from Google Analytics, for the past 30 days:
1,230 people visited this site
Visits: 1,850
Unique Visitors: 1,230
Pageviews: 3,946
Pages/Visit: 2.13
Avg. Visit Duration: 00:01:57
Bounce Rate: 61.57%
% New Visits: 59.46%
Maybe
And those stats aren't that bad. Im sure you could get one going.
Why don't you just make a blog post and let the users comment suggestions?
You can start it but don't expect that many to signup. The thing about people now adays is they won't join forums unless they have a lot to gain. Even this forum it probably has 100's to thousands of guests a day, but only a small percentage are actually registered and participate. Many people lurk on even massive forums with huge followings for months to years before actually registering.
If you look at a lot of popular forums, they're popular even if they shouldn't be for one of two reasons.
1)they're very old(example WHT)
2)they fake activity on the site(fake users, posts etc... i'd never do this myself but as a marketer I know it's effective, as who wants to join an empty community?)
But if you want to launch your forum, I wish you luck sir, just be ready for lot of spam bots.
Giving your blog a niche name (catering to folks fine tuning 96mb VPS servers) then reviewing non-niche services probably didn't help you from the beginning. Figure out what you want your audience to be, realistically, than take it from there. I learned this from a radio marketing guy
@96mb maybe trying to find someone who can speak chinese or something like that to help you out. We get huge amounts of traffic from Chinese blogs, but I never see a forum on their websites.
Planning things out, getting some rules together and having a vision of what you want to achieve would be a good idea
Couple of times I tried to visit your www.96mb.com, it was down. So as an idea, make sure you don't oversmart yourself in a chase for LEBs, and that your site actually works.
It is up now, but I see you use CloudFlare, and it likes being down on IPv6, so that's maybe where the problem sometimes appears.
I miss the technical side of the old forums and "old" members... I am willing to go anywhere to find something like that.
But not really for another teenage forum :-(
@Derek: well, that was the initial idea, however I guess some of the readers just feel the topics (reviewing VPS providers) are just too narrow for them
@taipres Thanks a lot for the suggestions, I was just doing 96MB as a hobby and has and would never expect to make it one of the hottest online forums whatsoever, so I am definitely OK living with 10 or so regulars in the forum for a few years.
@rm_: Yes, I got 2 downtime reports yesterday morning from uptimerobot, QuickWeb seems to have some network issues, but they were down for less than 10 minutes each. There was way more downtime a while ago, sometimes due to my own configuration failure (getting a failover mechanism running is something I've been thinking for a while now) and other times due to network issues with the provider.
Which URL did you try on IPv6? www.96mb.com or ipv6.96mb.com? I shut down IPv6.96mb.com as Cloudflare seems to indicate they have the capability to handle IPv6 traffic even with just the IPv4 configuration at the back end (6-to-4 of some sort)? But I guess I just trusted them too much and never bothered to test myself. Will look into this over the weekend. Thanks for the tip.
@Miky: by old forums you mean...? And I might be older than you think, although that is not quite relevant here
EDIT: Never mind, miss-read "the" old forum part, I guess you meant the V2 of LET? The archived copy of it has been down for like forever and no one seems to bother to fix it, @KuJoe if you could offer me a copy of the archive, I am more than happy to bring it back to life on one of my spare VPSes.
@96mb
I think it's better to have one forum with lots of members than having lots of forums with few members.
me too. I was with another username and more active
I've tried uptimerobot, but I wasn't impressed at all. Your node may be down for some minutes and it MAY not send you any notifications. Try setting up a nms system of your own.
@httpzoom Chinese forum is definitely a great idea, I'll do a bit more research on the feasibility, thanks.
@camarg I guess free is no good as well, yes, you've just reminded me on another item to do in the summer, any recommendation on a few good ones?
@96mb: I'd be glad to join!
@96mb For free try pingdoms 1 minute http checks, it works. For my vps and dedis I use cacti & nagios, but I don't think you'll have ram to spare on your 96mb vps. You could write a script checking the status code for 96mb.com and have it notify you in case it's down
@Boltersdriveer Thanks a lot for your support!
@camarg Doing that at the moment actually with a Pingdom business account that I got for free last month, but that script is definitely a great idea, I remember seeing a thread here a while ago about something similar, will run a search and see what I can find!
@96mb I dont think kujoe even has a copy, the 'new' owner is @chief and I think the idea is to get v2 running again... whenever theres time to fix it
But not really for another teenage forum :-(
I believe that you're not the only one who feels that way. I may take a peek from time to time to see if there's something interesting for me in case that idea will be realized.
@rm_: mind try ipv6.96mb.com? It should be up now, thanks!
@MikHo I guess until @Chief responds, we won't be able to have a copy then...
Probably not
Sigh...I guess he has no interests in responding to this
Did u really have any doubt? :-/