few questions for pre sales

[stevejustnew]

Hi am thinking of purchasing VB but have a few questions

I have never run a forum before so am very new , so treat me as the dummy that I am
thanks

1 I am thinking of purchasing VBulliten and paying for installation and 6 months of telephone support due to my complete lack of forum / php / Mysql knowledge but would also like to purchase the vBSEO Plugin to make Search Engine friendly URL's etc , would purchase of this plugin and installation void any 6 month phone support I purchased

2 I am unsure if my forum would be successfull so would just get shared hosting for the site , If the site did gain success would it be easy and fairly painless to move to a dedicated server

3 Is it fairly easy to configure templates to have a look and feel that would be consistent with my other site

4 Is it fairly easy to implement adsense on to a forum and would contextual advertising match page OK

5 Is there a minimum recommendation for hosting needs and what level of posters / members would a shared hosting package support

thanks very much

steve

[AdminNation]

Originally Posted by stevejustnew

Hi am thinking of purchasing VB but have a few questions

I have never run a forum before so am very new , so treat me as the dummy that I am
thanks

1 I am thinking of purchasing VBulliten and paying for installation and 6 months of telephone support due to my complete lack of forum / php / Mysql knowledge but would also like to purchase the vBSEO Plugin to make Search Engine friendly URL's etc , would purchase of this plugin and installation void any 6 month phone support I purchased

2 I am unsure if my forum would be successfull so would just get shared hosting for the site , If the site did gain success would it be easy and fairly painless to move to a dedicated server

3 Is it fairly easy to configure templates to have a look and feel that would be consistent with my other site

4 Is it fairly easy to implement adsense on to a forum and would contextual advertising match page OK

5 Is there a minimum recommendation for hosting needs and what level of posters / members would a shared hosting package support

thanks very much

steve

1. Can't answer. Wait for vB staff to reply. Given what it does, I can't imagine it would. But I suppose you better check first.

2. I'm moving from my dedicated server to a better one, and it shouldn't be bad. I say shouldn't because we took it offline to do it and shant put it back up until the new server is at the datacenter and configured properly in a day or two. But it seems pretty easy. You could always get help if need be.

3. If you know how to skin, yes. Since you don't, you'd need to hire somebody to get your forum skin to match your site's layout. But it can be done by somebody who knows what they're doing.

4. How well it matches depends on the theme you have installed and the way you choose to display them. But setting it up is fairly simple. A number of different adsense hacks are available here to licensed users.

5. At the very least you need Windowns/Mac/BSD/Linux/Solaris, PHP 4.3.3, and MySQL 4.0.16 on a server. Not sure if explicitly required, but you definitely want ImageMagik or GD. Ideally the better the server that's possible is what you should get. To find a host you may want to look here.