How much is a vbulletin license

Of course, the bigger the discussion board you have, the more power it will need. Big boards will require semi-dedicated or even dedicated servers don't expect to run a popular board on cheap shared hosting , but you can be sure that, if you choose vBulletin, no matter how big your forum gets, you will be able to deal with it. What are the key benefits from choosing and running vBulletin? Here are the top reasons to base your community on vBulletin. Shared hosting provides the cheapest option, while semi-dedicated hosting solutions offer more power for a higher price.

Fully dedicated servers offer the greatest speed, power, and flexibility, but at a substantially increased cost. Avatars and CSS stylesheets controlling the formatting of the discussion board can be stored either in the database or in the file system. Similarly, attachments can be uploaded and stored in either the database or the server file system.

For the ultimate in power and flexibility the database server and the web server can reside on separate computers. The import facility allows data from another forum to be converted into vBulletin format.

This includes users, posts, avatars and private messages. No matter whether you site is big or small, you don't want to be waiting around for things to happen.

Thanks to a variety of in-built tools the interface can be changed with the minimum knowledge of web programming languages. A templated system—all the code for the interface is conveniently stored as separate templates. Users can also pick and choose the style they want.

The ability to create and store multiple styles, which can be applied to different forums and users. Conditionals are supported in all templates. This allows you to write powerful and versatile code. Even the most stable discussion board needs maintenance every so often to keep it running properly. Also, since it is the data stored in the discussion board that forms the backbone of the community, data backup and restoration is vital.

Over the course of the book we will be looking at a number of them. To offer site owners the greatest possible flexibility there are two licensing options to choose from:.

Purchasing a leased license will allow you to run vBulletin on your server for one year. During this period you will be entitled to technical support and software upgrades. After this period you will either need to purchase another license or discontinue using the software. At the end of the lease period you can either renew the lease for another year or purchase an owned license. If you choose a leased license option, you will be given a short opportunity to upgrade your license to a fully owned license with no additional financial penalty—you just pay the difference in price between the two license types!

Purchasing an owned license will allow you to run a copy of vBulletin on your server for an unlimited amount of time and allows access to all updates released for one year. After the year you can purchase a renewal of this access.

Choose carefully between the two—making the wrong choice can end up costing you money in the long run. If you want a short-term forum or you want to try vBulletin out for size, then a leased license is the way to go. However, three years of running vBulletin at leased license prices costs more than an owned license with yearly support and upgrade options would have cost you and you still won't own the software.

As a general rule, unless you are pretty sure that you aren't going to be running vBulletin for a third year, upgrade to a full license at the end of the first year. By now, if you're not already using vBulletin, you're probably ready to see it in action! If you are reading this book because you're looking to be persuaded to purchase vBulletin or you're getting ready to buy a copy for a project soon, then in the meantime there are a number of good examples of vBulletin discussion boards in action on the Web.

Here are a few of the most popular:. The support and discussion forums here use, not surprisingly, vBulletin. This site gives you a very good idea of what vBulletin looks like pretty much 'out of the box' from the end-user perspective. This site is an excellent example of some of the things that it is possible to accomplish through modifying and tweaking collectively known as hacking the vBulletin code.

This forum is made up of nearly 2 million threads, which are made up of well over 30 million posts. As of present it has nearly , members this is regularly pruned to keep it manageable and usually has over members on the boards at any one time. This is a truly massive forum! This will allow you to quickly and easily include different options from your vBulletin discussion board on your site's homepage.

It also allows you to easily create and manage new pages in which you can use settings other than the default. If you want to see more vBulletin boards, then use your favorite search engine to search for vbulletin—you will find literally thousands of examples! Some will be basic while others will be highly customized. This chapter has been a quick tour outlining some of the benefits of using the vBulletin discussion board software as well as providing the background to its development.

We have this forum hosted with a company that somewhat specializes in forum hosting. For the use case you've described, I'd run it on my own hardware. Jul 8, 3. Uwe: I don't pretend to understand the tribulations, or the cost of forums from the host's perspective, but I've been visiting various other examples for many years now. Without intending any criticism of RT's current facility, or vortex which also uses Vbulletin I have no complaints of either forums , there are some nice extras from a user perspective on www.

But these are more, nice-to-have features, rather than being serious omissions in forum functions IMHO. The problem with comparing forum features is that i never knew that I needed a missing function until I see how useful it is on another forum!!

Again, I don't pretend to be an expert on forums, and I don't understand the details of what you're contemplating - but in a past life when I was interested in building value for another shareholder I'm retired now and there is only ONE shareholder that has my focus , I invariably started these investigations by asking users what they wanted! It was very comforting to have validation of what I thought users wanted.

But more importantly, it was always much-more informative to have responses that weren't in my own assumption-list. Last edited: Jul 8, Jul 8, 4. DV52 said:. Jul 8, 5. Sounds like the kernel for a decision has been planted in your psyche; it's germinated and now seeks nurturing and growth before a possible confirmation?

Jul 9, 6. From my own experiences of running a forum years ago I used to run ImprezaSport. When I started the biggest expense was the forum software license. With a small user base bandwidth wasn't really a concern so I could use a cheap monthly hosting package. As time went on though, the popularity of the site grew, so member numbers increased and bandwidth usage went up. Towards the end the popularity of the site dropped off, but the bandwidth usage kept going up largely due to spambot registrations.

The internet has changed since I hung up my admin underpants back in , but if you're planning to keep it small, with restricted registrations, then I'd assume the license will still be the main expense, especially if you can host it internally and not have to worry about bandwidth. If you do host externally, then the more the site is used the more bandwidth costs become an issue, especially if: you're externally hosted you allow public registrations you allow file uploads users always want this but images use waaaay more data than text The other cost you can't account for is time.

If the forum gets busy it can take up a surprisingly large amount of time, especially if you allow public registrations. You'll probably get spam bot registrations, so will either have to retrospectively nuke crap posts and accounts, or proactively moderate registrations. Advice I'd give? Go for a forum software that has all the features you want out-of-the-box. Most of the big forums can have features hacked into them, but anything you change may be lost the next time the software is updated, so you'd have to hack it all in again.

Also as I learned at my cost , it really is worth staying up to date with the software, as any vulnerabilities that are discovered tend to be exploited, as it's easy to find sites on a given version of a specific forum software. Does your company work like industry standards or does it have its own customized processes? What kind of special reports are needed? In order to calculate the cost of customization you can use the following estimates:. As a rule of thumb the cost of data migration depends on how many records you want to migrate.

Records can include the number of customers, invoices, financial transactions, products, versions, etc. Relevant for vBulletin As a buyer, you are required to pay extra for in-person training, though some vendors offer web-based solutions as part of the package. In order to calculate the cost you can use the following estimates:. The science of TCO total cost of ownership may not be easy to calculate.

Contact us today and get up to date, detailed quotes. Shlomi holds a Bachelor of Science B. Shlomi brings 15 years of global IT and IS management experience as a consultant, and implementation expert for small, medium and large size global companies. Compare Pricing.

What is vBulletin's cost rating? What are the typical Self-Service Portal pricing models? Cost of data migration when migrating to vBulletin? Relevant for vBulletin Most companies opt for data migration services from a vendor, which raises the cost of product ownership. If you choose to transfer data on your own, you can avoid paying the cost of data migration. Data migration cost depends on the amount of data to be transferred, your current software, availability of migration tools, complexity of data, and gaps between the existing system and the new system.

If your data is stored in Excel spreadsheets, then it may incur you a lot of time and money to migrate data from Excel. By involving a business services provider in data migration, you are asking them to offer additional services, for which you may have to pay extra.

What is the cost of training for vBulletin? How vBulletin pricing compares to alternative Self-Service Portal solutions?