okay so if i'm going to be making an online community which is the best place to buy web hosting from?

where do most people that own forums get web hosting from?

i predict at the beginning my forum will be a closed forum so i wont need much storage / bandwidh.

but some day i may decide to open the forum to public and would want to not get kicked from web host for using to much storage / bandwidth

would it be better to host my own website?

Depends if you want to control your own server or not. You can buy cheap hosting for like 10$ a month which essentially is a cpanel and ftp account where you can upload/manage your site. Then on the other hard you can buy a virtual or dedicated server which range 20-man hundreds of dollars, but you would have install your own httpd (nginx or apache most likely), install php, and setup other software if need be (mysql).

Depends if you want to control your server or have a simple to setup area to place your website and nothing else.

i use linode, its like $20 / month

You cant use cheap hosting for an active community

I'd recommend a godaddy vps

rackspace or amazon

This post was edited by PixileDust on Jul 3 2014 11:16pm

Digital Ocean or Rackspace

I'll put you on my server for FG.

This post was edited by PixileDust on Jul 9 2014 01:07pm