vBulletin Cloud announced: remote forum hosting

Martin Brinkmann
Jan 25, 2014
Updated • Jan 25, 2014
Internet
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VBulletin is a popular forum software that you find used by many large websites on the Internet. It is not free, unlike others such as phpBB, PHPWind, or Vanilla, with licenses starting at $249 for vBulletin 5.0 Connect, the latest version of the forum software.

If you purchase vBulletin, you need to install it on a compatible web server. In addition to that, all the customizing and updating falls also on your shoulder, which means that you will spend some time doing so.

The company behind the forum software just announced vBulletin Cloud, a cloud-hosted version of vBulletin that does away with several of these requirements.

Appealing to some users is the fact that the forum will be hosted by vBulletin, which means that you do not need a web server, or install it by yourself.

According to the official page, the remotely hosted forum will be fully customizable just like standalone installations of vBulletin are.

Another benefit here is that the software will get updated automatically, so that you do not have to monitor security updates anymore to protect your forum from exploits targeting those vulnerabilities.

All forums come with 100 Gigabyte of data storage. Here is the current overview of plans available.

  • Bronze: 25 Gigabyte of bandwidth, for $14.99 per month if paid annually.
  • Silver: 75 Gigabyte of bandwidth, for $29.99 per month if paid annually.
  • Gold: 200 Gigabyte of bandwidth, for $59.99 per month if paid annually.

As you can see, vBulletin Cloud is a subscription-based service. While there is no long-time commitment, the operating costs may be higher than purchasing a forum license and installing it on your own system.

The bottleneck in my opinion is the bandwidth that is made available. 25 Gigabyte may seem like a lot, but it is not really that much. If a single forum page has a size of 100 Kilobyte for example, you can deliver approximately 250,000 requests before the bandwidth runs out. And that is not taking into account your own visits to the admin interface or bots that crawl the forum.

The solution is scalable according to the cloud page, which means that you may be required to update the bandwidth, or even jump to a more expensive plan, if your forum reaches the bandwidth barrier of the plan that you have selected.

vBulletin Cloud Pros

  • You do not need your own web server to run a forum.
  • Maintenance and upgrades are handled by vBulletin.
  • Servers optimized for running forum software.
  • No need to upgrade the license when a new major version comes out.
  • No long term commitment if you pay monthly.

vBulletin Cloud Cons

  • Monthly subscription fee.
  • Low bandwidth plans.

The initial version of vBulletin Cloud is only for new websites. The makers plan to introduce an import option though that enables existing forum owners to migrate their forum to the cloud hosted forum.

The homepage leaves several questions unanswered. For instance, it is possible to host the forum on your own domain, or do you need to host it on a domain vBulletin assigns to you. I have contacted vBulletin for clarification and will update the review once I have an answer.

Update: vBulletin Cloud supports custom domains. The service is somewhat restricted though in comparison to the regular version of the forum software. It is for example not possible to use third party addons, modifications or styles, and some features, such as use of the PHP module, have been restricted for security reasons.

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Comments

  1. Tyreese said on January 26, 2015 at 10:58 pm
    Reply

    vBulletin is not bad, Sure the changes are done through old developed code, however, they are working hard to make sure that customers are satisfied with their product. We just don’t have enough developers working on vBulletin. It would be nice if he had more resources allocated to vbulletin.

  2. SM said on January 26, 2015 at 2:29 pm
    Reply

    Do you know if they offer application hosting as well as forum hosting? I have a small Ruby project I’m working on and would like to consolidate it with my forum hosting. I was also looking at a company called Virtzone. I’d appreciate any insight anyone has on this. Thanks

  3. Leon said on January 26, 2014 at 4:39 pm
    Reply

    I’d rather pay phpBB to host my forum than the thieving scumbags from IB.
    Mind you I hate phpBB, but at least my money would go to commendable purposes I would not be ashamed of.

  4. Swarup said on January 26, 2014 at 5:39 am
    Reply

    Personally I think vB is dying slowly.

    As I see that most Popular forum start using XenForo Forum Software.

    Lightweight, easy to use and mire users-friendly.

    What do you think Martin ?

  5. BTRB said on January 25, 2014 at 5:00 pm
    Reply

    Some Alternatives to the vBulletin Cloud (so far):
    – The forum hosting service of not-free cloud hosting provider Cloudways
    – ActiveBoard, which runs on the cloud and is free (upgradeable to the paid Gold plan)
    – Discourse Hosting, with its cloud-hosted forum hosting with 4 paid plans (1-week free trial for all plans except the Enterprise one)
    – Ninja Post, also runs on the cloud with 4 paid plans (15-day free trial/30-day free trial for Premium)

  6. Dwight Stegall said on January 25, 2014 at 12:44 pm
    Reply

    Did they finally make it secure? It used to be the most insecure blogging software you could get.

  7. hum said on January 25, 2014 at 11:39 am
    Reply

    Is that the same vBulletin which got hacked wide open just a few weeks ago?
    http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/11/password-hack-of-vbulletin-com-fuels-fears-of-in-the-wild-0-day-attacks/

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