Ever used free forum hosting?

I know when I was younger, and learning how to run a community, I used free forum hosting for about a month, and then moved my way up to paid hosting. But, how about you? Have you ever used free forum hosting? How do you feel about free forum hosting?

 

My first forum was hosted by Forumotion

 

My first forum was on ProBoards. That was back in 2003 when I was 13. I'll never go back to free hosting again, that's for sure! Too many restrictions on the accounts plus I hate forced ads!

 

Same here, but it taught you a lot, didn't it? Because starting off on free hosting usually helps you set your standards for future hosting.

 

Indeed it did. I had about...65 ProBoard forums before I switched to hosted phpBB for the first time about 3-4 years on on FreeForums and then shortly after on Formotion. Those 3 taught me about administration pros, cons, dos, don'ts, activity level an administrator must have to be successful and things like that. All in all hosted forums have made my life easier now that I own a forum of my own.

 

Who hasn't started on free forum hosting? Kind of an awkward question when you stop and think about it, because all forums start off somewhere. Anyways, my first host was Forumotion back in 2008. One of the crappiest experiences ever in my foruming life. Downtime every weekend, and my email and PMs were full of, "why were we down this weekend yet again?" At the time I didn't understand what was happening as I was a newbie forum owner; all I knew was that all the downtime we were experiencing wasn't my fault. I'd go on my site wanting to make even one post, and then I'd go on to find that there is some sort of stupid technical stuff that apparently couldn't wait for a rainy day (pardon the pun, there). It was pathetic and I'd never go back to them. Sounds like they're even worse now as so many forums are so vunerable to hackers it's not even funny. One of the best free hosts I ever used was ProphpBB. Probably my favorite free host ever, and I'm always happy to recommend them to a newbie forum owner who doesn't know what host he should go for. In fact, when hiring new staff who don't know much about phpBB, I actually recommend that new applicants for staff positions do a test board on ProphpBB so that they're familiar with at least some of its features.

 

Yes, I started on free forum hosting, although I did'nt get onto a decent one until a friend referred me to ProphpBB

 

I don't even remember how I found out about ProphpBB... can't remember if I simply looked up "free forum hosting" on Google, or if I was a member of a site hosted on ProphpBB and wanted to try it for myself. I've used so many free hosts since 2008, I wouldn't be surprised if I found out that I used them all by now.

 

Everyone experiments with free forum hosting because they cannot either afford hosting, afford domains and etc, when they start getting domains then they will start to experiement using FileZilla or cPanel.

 

Yes, I used forumotion - once and never again!
Because I couldn't order a backup, I had to startet with zero postings and members again after leaving the freehoster. And the support admin was unfriendly too...

 

My first couple of forums were hosted using free forum hostings. Ah, those were the good times. I believed I used Forumotion. I was so excited when I got it done that I spent the entire night creating threads and whatever. Too bad it failed horribly.

 

I used to use ProBoard, which I believe are still going strong.

I played around with a couple of those ones that offer 1.3 IPB, but I never thought they were good enough to run with, and whilst skimming through the ones in their database I saw most of them were abandoned after a few months.

 

A long, long time ago, I used IPB Free. Moved on from that after a few months to self hosting, never looked back.