I would like to set up a vBulletin board but I'm concerned about ongoing costs.

[Brucelee]

Hi everyone ... I would like to set up a vBulletin board around one of my hobbies but I'm concerned about ongoing costs such as web space and traffic, obviously to start with this will be minimal but over time could grow substantially if some of the boards I frequent are any indication to go by, most of the boards have advertising or donation requests so I guess my question is to anyone that may be currently running a board is do these boards cover their costs via advertising and donations or could I possibly end up with a liability. :eek:
Thanks for any help. :)

[I-Web]

I suppose it would depend how popular or unpopular your boards are as an example i know of one such community it started life as a sponsored site from our hosting company for a short time and through donations and advertising they soon progressed to paying for their site yet further along they were able to afford to get a dedicated server to themselves.
It does take some hard selling to get people to advertise with you and in most cases they wil only consider advertising if there is an established userbase. To sum it up it will be a liability to start with but as time goes by and the userbase builds up it could very well end up an asset depending how well it is run.