A few questions before i make the Jump

[ultimategeek]

Hi
i run a forum and i am using phpBB, but i have had nothing but problems so later today i will with luck be making the jump.
My questions are as follows:
Is Siteground a good host for vBulletin (use them now for my forum)
I would like to set up a Home page with Tabs, is this easy enough to do?
and the last question is about affiliate's: is there a way of when a member puts address in a thread that it auto affiliate's it?
I will also be using a iMac and FileZilla, will this be ok?

Thanks and i hope i've found a new home

[fdifranco]

Hi,

I use vBulletin on Siteground and I think they are quite good (both vB AND SiteGround!).

I use the CMS mainly. Feel free to check out www.whoshurt.com to see my vB site running at SiteGround.

Hope that helps!

-fab

[ultimategeek]

Thanks for your input, awesome site by the way.
How easy was it to set up?

[fdifranco]

It wasn't too tough to set up but I took my time with it. The vB installation is pretty painless (but I can tell you that my first ever install was a professional install by vB). I'm sure that most people just install it themselves.

There is a rather straightforward readme.txt or install.txt file that you just follow. The only thing is to get a special vb file called config.php set up properly. If you are already with Siteground then you know the ropes there. They will give you a userid and all of your databases will be prefixed with that userid (and an underscore) so just make sure you get the database name right in the config.php (among a few other fields such as db userid and password as well).

Unless you are really good with CSS (I'm not that great with it) then I would recommend purchasing one of the pre-made skins out there. I think that I paid something like $35 for the skin that I'm using (there's a link to the company at the bottom of my site) and it was money well spent.

You'll have a few things to learn but there are plenty of good vB tutorials on YouTube. That's how I learned a lot... and of course don't forget vbulletin.org because that site has tons of knowledgeable people.

I have a few PHP widgets on my site that access a database. If you are going to do that then you'll probably want to add the SSH package to your Siteground account. It's a few bucks extra but if you need command line access then it's definitely worth it.

Check out some of the "Board of the Month" entries and winners at vbulletin.org and you can see a lot of really top-notch boards. I didn't need anything too extravagant so I just went with a 3rd party skin. Oh, and if you are not a very good artist (I am not very good) then I recommend getting a subscription to a good images site (I use bigstockphoto.com). I tried to stick with a family of images (I used the 3D man) otherwise if you use too many different pictures from all over the web then your site will look like a ransom note!

-fab

[ultimategeek]

Thanks for all the info Fab