I have bought a few domains from GoDaddy.com. Once my forum, Said Wicked, is a little more active I would like to go ahead and switch it from http://saidwicked.forumotion.com to just saidwicked.com. I noticed on forumotion they offer custom domains.
Has anyone else ever bought their domain name from the site they originally opened their forum on? I've never done this. Every other forum I've ever had I started from scratch and built with phpbb blah blah blah.
Mostly I'm just scared of buying my domain name from forumotion.com and getting ripped off. Tell me what to do!!!
If I was in your situation, I'd move away from Forumotion, but if you don't want to do that, I'd highly suggest you buy a domain from somewhere like NameCheap rather than on-site. You get ripped off with Forumotion. It's about $22 per year for a domain (1600 credits) whereas at NameCheap, you can get them for about $9.
This probably sounds noobish considering I've been building websites since I was 12 - But if I do buy my domain name somewhere else other than forumotion... Will I lose my forum and have to start over? I've honest to god never done this before. - Like I said I have always started from complete scratch. 🙁
You gotta start somewhere, so we've all been "noobs" at one point, so whatever man. I believe that you can point your domain through DNS to your forumotion forum, but you can always start from complete scratch with control panel-based (cPanel as an example) hosting. However, you can always convert from Forumotion to phpBB 3 (and then to whatever forum software you want if phpBB 3 isn't sufficient) using nneonneo's converter.
There are other remotely-hosted forum software that convert to SMF and phpBB 2 as well, but I know for a fact that the forumotion converter only goes to phpBB 3.
I see. Well that's reassuring because I'm familiar with phpbb3. Thanks. I guess we'll see what happens. I dont really want to commit to a custom domain quite yet. Unless you guys think I should do it sooner rather than later. I only have 75 members right now.
Yes, I would like it to be successful. Although it's really hard for me to give the full attention it needs sometimes especially since I'm in my 5th year of college and getting ready for my LSAT and stuff like that. I would hire moderators but I've had such bad luck with them in the past it's hard for me to trust people now. Sigh. This forum stuff is tough! :yes:
