Presales questions

[mikepayne]

I'm possibly interested in signing up for a hosting account here. I was interested in the list of applications that come preinstalled or can be automatically installed(one of your pages said hosting plans come with like 52 free script applications). I was wondering if one of them is a forum. If so, is it the same forum script we're using right now? Can I completely customize the design?

Basically I am looking to have another site running on another server that just links back to only a forum which would be located here. The design would look identical and there would be no way for the user to tell they were on a different site except reading the address bar. Would this be possible?

Hello mikepayne,

You can see a list of the scripts being installed by Fantastico currently in our hosting here: http://netenberg.com/fantastico_scripts.php

What is the name of the forum that you are currently using?

With the forums installed by Fantastico, you do have the option to customize them as well.

[charlesgan]

this forum is using vbulletin, its not free, purchase license to install.

alternatively you can use the phpbb that come with hostgator free scripts.

[mikepayne]

Will I be able to totally customize the html of all the forum pages? It's important that I be able to make it look like the rest of the site which will be located on another server. Other than the domain in the address changing they need to be identical so that if I want I can hide it inside a frame or something and never have the user know they're on another site.

[Blitz]

If you our looking on starting a forum and you don't want to pay any cost I suggest you use MyBB http://www.mybboard.net/. It's free and it looks like vbulletin plus it's simple to use.

[mikepayne]

That's actually not it at all. I have my web site on an asp.net host because I am an asp.net programmer and I intend to write my own custom applications for the site for the shopping cart and things like that.

However, I would also like to set up a forum. It is very hard to find forum programs already set up to go out-of-the-box for ASP.NET, and the ones that are out there usually cost several hundred dollars or more. Even the expensive ones aren't nearly as well tested as some of the PHP or Perl or the other solutions out there.

I want to set up my web site on my own web host and pay for an account here simply to host the forums on. My web site would link to the forums hosted on hostgator but the entirety of the rest of the web site would be located on a different host. I'm interested in the fact that they come automatically installed on hostgator and I can just turn them on, but I'm trying to figure out if what I'm tying to do is possible.

[gwyneth]

Originally Posted by mikepayne

I want to set up my web site on my own web host and pay for an account here simply to host the forums on. My web site would link to the forums hosted on hostgator but the entirety of the rest of the web site would be located on a different host. I'm interested in the fact that they come automatically installed on hostgator and I can just turn them on, but I'm trying to figure out if what I'm tying to do is possible.

Except for the fact that they don't come pre-installed, everything you want is possible (maybe because they don't come pre-installed). HG provides an installer script, Fantastico, through cPanel, but its choice of fora is limited, and there are many other arguments for doing the installation yourself--of any of the fora app included or not included in Fantastico.

[mikepayne]

I'd like to set up my hostgator account with a subdomain off my current domain(ie. forums.mydomain.com). Would this be possible?

[GatorSteveN]

http://www.hostgator.com/tutorials/c...-subdomain.htm

[mikepayne]

This shows you how to create subdomains off your current site if you are hosted with Hostgator. I am hosted with an ASP.NET provider and I would like to add a subdomain on my current provider that is just a DNS CNAME alias forwarding the requests to an address at hostgator which would be something like http://members.hostgator.com/~mikepayne/. I was wondering if it's possible to do that.

Basically, I want my entire web site hosted on another server with just forums.mydomain.com pointing to a forum hosted on Hostgator.

Yes you can,

You can sign up using domain.com or forums.mydomain.com Then create an A record at your current provider, to point to the server IP address that you are given for the sub domain forums.