Forums are sneakily expensive. What are some unexpected costs?

[joelr]

Forums are not just the license cost of the software. You have to pay for the domain and VPS at a minimum. You may also pay for plugins, mods, and themes. You may also have paid email, paid backups, and more.

What are some of the sneaky and unexpected costs that surprised you about running your forum?

 

[Tracy]

Luckily I pretty much have realized all the costs of the site.
I have never (in over a decade) had to rely on outside providers to fix any issues on the server aspect, and since the license costs are a known quality they are not unexpected.

Now, if we want to delve into the "want to make the site better" costs of extending the core script from what it offers even beyond 3rd party add-ons that is an entirely different manner.
I budget $200 a month for site costs. When it gets to around 80% of that cost I start looking at it more closely.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I really try to have a revenue budget with any website I make.

If it won't be a passive income site, like a forum, then I watch what I spend. Most addons take attention away from the forum, so I keep those to a bare minimum and focus on content, instead. That's free.

The theme should be unique from the default but simple. Pixel Exit has great themes that are affordable. I go with them.

The domain cost stays the same pretty much.

Hosting is where most of the money changes will occur. I have two VPS servers - 1 for websites, 1 for MySQL. I purposely got larger ones that I can still afford but have more resources than I need. This way, I can grow into them, plus I'm spending money on the people I host with. They're making money and that helps to keep them around.

I do hope to eventually do premium memberships as well as donation drives to help let the forum pay for itself PLUS add a budget which I'll use for the occasional addon or contest winnings.

I don't want to profit from forums.