Pros and cons of free hosted forums

[nomad]

If you want to build a forum without having to spend any money, you can try free forum hosting services like proboards, forumotion, jcink, etc. The major benefit of using these platforms is do not have to spend money, you can easily get started. The major disadvantages include, not having control over your forum, ads that are being displayed by the hosting company, etc. Do you use free hosted forums?

 

[Mendalla]

It is quite possible to run a decent forum site on shared hosting for just a couple hundred a year plus some capital investment (like styling) upfront that goes away if you can do it yourself. And you can bring that down further by using open source software like phpbb instead of commercial software like Xenforo (which runs this site and mine). So I don't see much advantage to what you describe other than if you want your site to be 100% cost-free.