Saito said:
[quote name='Nebulous']There is more irreversable things that could happen. Look at IPBFree. Zathyus is not going to be around forever. The admin could go bankrupt, servers can crash, or a court could order that everything be removed and shut down. You never know. It even says in their TOS that they can shut down or delete your board without notice for any reason and they dont even have to tell you why.
Its too risky to run a forum on a host like that. I know I would not pour tons of effort and time into something that could disappear for any reason at any time. All the people who defend remotely hosted free hosts will change their tune once it all hits the fan for them.
Also, you dont need to pay for hosting or a domain... There is plenty of free web hosts out there and plenty of free domain services. Or you can use whatever url the free host gives you.
You can host your own self maintained phpbb or mybb or smf or whatever without paying a cent. Also there is thousands of modifications for those software's. So on top of having the ability to backup and protect your forum, you can add in tons of different modifications to make your board have more features and functions than a Zetaboard will ever have.
There is a few things I am going to discredit on you Nebulous.
First off. You were going on about ZB going bankrupt, servers crashing, etc. Unfortunately, so can paid hosts. Do they keep your stuff? Nope. That's YOUR job to do so. Unless it's maintainence, they aren't reliable for any of your items that's stored on their servers. So, ZB and self-hosting is the same on that part.
As far as paying for domain and hosting...that you might be right on, but you get what you pay for. ZB, at least, has a very decent uptime. Not 100% or whatnot, but a very good uptime. Now for free hosts...well...from experience with many of the free hosts out there, they can just shut you down fast, or they drop faster than bottle rockets. Basically put: They aren't reliable. As I said, you get what you pay for. As far as the domain, PR rating means a lot to sites. That's all I will say on domains.
As far as the maintaining your own board, think about this. Most people don't have the knowledge to know what they are doing in their own self hosted board. Granted, most have modifications and shit that you can use to make your users lives better on your board. But with that, comes a security risk. Most modifications are coded by other people, which aren't who normally codes the board software. So it's not going to have the same security. And thus, creates holes in your security. From there, they can get in, take anything (Your personal items, for example) and make like a bandit, and you'll never know who did it.
Take this from someone who has been maintaining his own server for roughly 7 years. I know the ins and outs of forum preventive maintainance and security. And even site security. But take it as you will. I'll be waiting to see if I either get flamed for my comments, or end up with a stupid answer.[/quote]
Uh huh, the point of making backups is to protect your forum in case any of the above happens, you can backup your forum regularly and keep a copy of everything on your computer or even save it to a flash drive. No matter what happens, it can all be restored.
Also lets say this community gets bored of it being on vB. We could raise money to convert it to IPB or switch to a free one like phpbb, mybb or whatever other software we want.
