Interested In Buying vBulletin 5 & Hosting

[Sneijder]

Is that $249 + the $59.99 a month? What's the confusing difference?

[Sneijder]

I don't wanna stop owning my forum just because I decide to stop paying for the hosting..

[Mark.B]

No. There are two options - the cloud service is a monthly payment and we host it for you. The $249 is a one off payment and you host it yourself. You pay one or the other, not both.

Obviously if you cancel the cloud service and stop the payments, your forum gets turned off, though we can provide you with a copy of the database. Many people start off with the cloud version with a low end package top 'test the water' with their forum, and if it takes off they then purchase the self-hosted version and move to that.

[Sneijder]

Ok makes sense.. so I just point my A record to your IP? If I have a domain and all that.. I still wanna have control of the domain at least..

[Sneijder]

I may buy like 9 host myself and one hosting for something important that needs to be up in a quick time frame.. I've had a peak at previous versions but never actually installed one properly.. say I wanted vBadvanced? Because the built blog and articles look a bit naff.. do you install the addons and all that?

[Mark.B]

The cloud service uses CNAME records rather than A records.

The cloud service doesn't allow the use of any third party add ons, nor template editing. You can edit css and add custom css though.

vBAdvanced isn't available for vB5 anyway - the company that made it ceased all support some time ago, theough I believe the website is still online. It only works with vBulletin 4, so if you wanted that, you'd need to use our self hosted product and install vB4 rather than vB5.

Note that regardless of which vBulletin product you choose, we don't provide any support at all for third party add ons.

[Sneijder]

Ok I'll just go with the self hosting.. vB4 or something.. so it's $249 per domain then?

[Mark.B]

Ok I'll just go with the self hosting.. vB4 or something.. so it's $249 per domain then?

Yes...$249 per instance of the software.

[Sneijder]

Regarding addons.. I know theres vBadvanced & vCash.. but is there an addon to charge for avatars etc? Like $1 a month or something?

[Sneijder]

Or maybe VB5 isn't that bad.. but you forbid addons totally in the gold host? I couldn't even have vCash with it?

[glennrocksvb]

Self hosted allows addons but vBCloud does not. You can do anything with the self hosted version.

[Sneijder]

How do I charge people for avatar use? My PHP and MySQL is limited..

[Sneijder]

Or at least I've seen something similar for VB3.. is version 3 still available? So I can have vBadvanced/VBookie/Pay To Register?

[Mark.B]

You can run vBulletin 3 with a self hosted license, yes.

We do not provide any support or assistance with add ons though. There is a peer-to-peer support site for that, www.vbulletin.org. Note that it is peer to peer, you won't get vBulletin developers teaching you how to write code...it does have both paid and unpaid request sections though.

Charging for avatars could be done natively using paid subscriptions and user group promotions. However, I would say that the days of being charged to have an avatar (if it was ever viable) probably ended about a decade ago. Nobody's going to go for that. Imagine if Facebook charged you to have a profile picture! On most forums, people will just walk away from that I'm afraid.

[Sneijder]

Yea but we're talking no other membership.. or that would be the membership.. nearly all members would succumb voluntarily.. or not.. just a thought.. can't be any worse than the hundreds of forums struggling every month with their donations..? Free everything else etc.. articles.. vBookie etc.. chat room and all that..