Discussion board and community forum platforms for hosting threaded conversations, Q&A, and member interactions. All available with one-click installation on 365i web hosting.
Flarum is a free, open-source forum software designed to create interactive, modern community forums...
MyBB (MyBulletinBoard) is a free, open-source forum software that provides users with a feature-rich...
phpBB, short for “PHP Bulletin Board,” is a free, open-source forum software that enables users...
Simple Machines Forum (SMF) is a free, open-source software designed for building and managing onlin...
Vanilla Forums is a free, open-source software designed for building and managing online communities...
Forum software runs threaded discussion: boards, topics, replies, member profiles, moderation queues. The five applications here (phpBB, MyBB, Simple Machines Forum, Flarum and Vanilla) are self-hosted PHP and MySQL, which means the whole archive lives in a database you own and stays readable by search engines.
That last point is most of the reason forums never disappeared. Facebook Groups, Discord and Slack absorbed an enormous amount of community traffic, and none of them leaves anything behind. Fifteen years of answers inside a Discord server cannot be found on Google, cannot be exported into a knowledge base, and stop existing the day the platform changes its terms. A public forum is a permanent, indexable, ownable archive of questions and the answers people gave to them, which is why product support communities in particular kept using them.
The commercial alternatives are real and worth pricing. Discourse offers a limited free tier and charges $100 a month for Pro and $500 for Business; it is also free to self-host, though it is Ruby and Docker rather than PHP. Circle is $89 a month on Professional plus 2% on payments. Against those, phpBB or MyBB on a standard hosting plan costs the hosting and nothing else, with no per-member pricing and no ceiling on how many people register. All five install in one click from the My365i control panel.
Situations we see often. If one of these sounds like you, this category is worth a look.
The membership skews older, uses email and a browser, and will not install a chat app in order to ask one question. A forum with email notifications meets people where they already are and leaves the answer findable afterwards.
Half the value is a customer searching at eleven at night and landing on an answer somebody already gave two years ago. Chat platforms hide that content from search engines entirely, which quietly turns every answered question into a question you will answer again.
Three hundred thousand posts, a custom theme nobody has the source for, and a PHP version that stopped getting security fixes years ago. The forum itself is fine: what it needs is a current PHP version, a database that fits in memory, and daily backups.
Membership rises and falls, most members lurk, and paying a seat price for people who read once a month makes no sense. Self-hosting makes the ten-thousandth member cost exactly what the tenth member cost.
Because all your software options for online community are, quite frankly, terrible.
He wrote that to launch a competitor, and it landed because it was fair at the time. Thirteen years on, the picture has split rather than improved uniformly: phpBB, MyBB and Simple Machines quietly modernised and still ship releases, Flarum rebuilt the idea from scratch, and Vanilla lost its maintainer. Treat the criticism as a prompt to check a project's recent release history instead of its reputation.
Forum software has aged interestingly. The core engineering questions have not changed in fifteen years (database schema for threads, search across many posts, spam handling, mail flow for notifications), and we have tuned for them on shared hosting since 2002. Our default PHP and MySQL settings cope with forums up to several hundred thousand posts. Above that, the shape of the queries matters more than raw CPU and a small managed cloud server with predictable I/O is the right step.
Four of the five are alive. phpBB ships 3.3.17 as its stable line, with 4.0 still in alpha; 4.0.0-a2 arrived in April 2026, rebuilt on Symfony 7.4 and requiring PHP 8.2, and the project says plainly it is not for live sites. MyBB released 1.8.40 in May 2026. Simple Machines Forum released 2.1.7 in March 2026, with 3.0 still sitting on a branch after a very long wait. Flarum's stable line is 1.8.x and 2.0 has reached release candidate.
Vanilla is the exception, and it matters more than a version number. Higher Logic, which acquired Vanilla in 2021, stopped updating the open-source edition on 1 January 2025 and has since ended development and support of it. The last conventional open-source release was 2.6.3 in September 2018, and the public repository at github.com/vanilla/vanilla returned a 404 when we checked in August 2026. Existing installs keep working; do not start a new community on one.
What a forum demands of a host. Outbound email above all, because notifications are half the product. Registration spam is the other constant, so turn moderation and question-based signup on from day one. Flarum wants SSH and Composer for extension management, both of which our plans include. Not for you if you actually want live chat. Discord or Matrix does that far better than a forum imitating it.
Common questions we hear from people running forum software applications on 365i hosting.
phpBB if you want the largest community and the longest track record, MyBB if you want something lighter with a cleaner admin, Simple Machines Forum if your members already know it. Flarum if you want a modern single-page interface and are comfortable managing extensions from the command line. Avoid starting anything new on Vanilla. All four of the first choices shipped a release within the last six months, and that is the check worth doing before you pick anything on reputation.
Not in any practical sense. Higher Logic, which bought Vanilla in 2021, stopped updating the open-source edition on 1 January 2025 and has since discontinued development and support of it. The last conventional open-source release was 2.6.3, back in September 2018, and the public repository at github.com/vanilla/vanilla returned a 404 when we checked in August 2026. The commercial Higher Logic Vanilla product carries on; the free edition you would install here has no maintainer. If you run one, start planning a migration to phpBB or Flarum.
No. Discourse is a Ruby on Rails application that expects Docker, PostgreSQL, Redis and background job workers, all running continuously, and its own guidance assumes a server with a couple of gigabytes of RAM to itself. None of that fits a shared PHP account. A VPS or managed cloud server would run it, but at that point compare the total against Discourse's own hosting, which starts at $100 a month on Pro and takes the operations work away entirely.
Question-based registration beats CAPTCHA on a small forum, because a question only your audience can answer defeats generic bots without annoying humans. Add first-post moderation, a minimum post count before links are allowed, and one of the shared blocklists; integrations exist for phpBB, MyBB and Simple Machines. Spam is also a hosting problem, not only a moderation one: thousands of registration attempts generate thousands of confirmation emails, which hits outbound mail limits and damages your domain's sending reputation.
Only if the domain is set up properly, and this is where most forums quietly fail. Configure SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the domain before you open registration. For a forum sending more than a few hundred messages a day, point it at a transactional email provider such as Brevo, Mailgun, Postmark or SendGrid rather than the shared mail server, because subscription notifications fan out fast: one busy thread can produce a message per subscriber per reply. We will help you get the DNS records right.
Usually yes, and the converters are better than people expect. phpBB, MyBB and Simple Machines all ship or link to tools that read each other's databases, and Flarum has importers for the common ones. Posts, topics, users and dates come across cleanly. What rarely survives is attachments with unusual paths, custom BBCode from a modification nobody documented, and the old post URLs. Map redirects from the old URL pattern to the new one before you switch, or you lose the search rankings that made the archive worth keeping.
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All 5 forum software applications available with one-click installation on our fast UK web hosting.
