Just a few days ago, I started two discussion boards through phpBBforfree.com. During that time, the server has often been offline, many people have not been able to reach the boards, and several of my private messages went missing.

I believe phpBBforfree may be in the process of changing servers, so I'm wondering if I just happened to join at a very bad time, or if this is the usual quality of phpBBforfree.com? Should I be looking for a new host or just weather this out?

Any insights/info. welcome.

yes, bad idea. I had them for a few months and it was incredibly slow and chockfull of ads. Had a lot of downtime. Webmaster is very immature and comes across as very unprofessional. As of now, (early October 2005), they are down again for an unknown length of time. Better to cut your losses and get a more reliable service.

I second that opinion. I have a forum with them and the webmaster is extremely rude and unprofessional. And the forum was horribly slow which caused me to lose members and when I asked "politely" when the forums would be back online (THIS TIME), the webmaster gave me a rude reply and also said "don't know when they'll be up and running again" either. So that was very helpful!

hi can any of you recamend another free forum that i can try i have tryed 3 this last week and all have given me trouble but this one is the pits

I offer free forum hosting at http://www.kazorum.com
We have about 5 mins of downtime every 2 weeks or so while the server is rebooted, apart from that our server is never down
We also have a friendly support forum at http://www.kazsupport.com

Anyone know why they're down now and if they're coming back up? I've about had it, so I'm jumping ship, but I'd love to get my data offline first.

Thanks.

- Ali

Ah, nm. I finally got to the support forums. Apparently, then went down September 30th for maintenance...

dalecom, I have a friend who hosts a forum and she's done so for nearly a year and never once has it gone down. Its called invisionfree. You might try that one if you want reliability. I moved over to that one also.

Yes Mashaka. They are down for server maintenance and its the 2nd time this has happened in just a short period. They also said they would be up and running by Friday at the latest so I'll check and see if my forum is visible tomorrow, but I doubt it.

I used them for about a month. They were down more then they were up. I switched over to http://freephpnukehosting.com/ This guy is very good. I have been using his service for about a month and he has never been down. He will help you with any issues you might have. You have full control over your website, just like your hosting it from your own server. This service isn't recommended for a beginner user, because you are required to know some about apache and php web hosting. My site is http://www.bluegeekz.com

This is a really old thread but I figured since I found it from a search that maybe someone looking for a forum host might.

I use Freepowerboards to host our board www.freepowerboards.com/roadshouse/

We never have any problems like what you said above. Once time I got page could not be found but I asked their live support chat people and they told me something must not have clicked with my computer and just to refresh and it worked fine. You might want to try them out if you are still having troubles.