PunBB Cloud Hosting

Quick, Simple, and Scalable PunBB Cloud Hosting

What is PunBB Cloud Hosting?

The PunBB Cloud hosting service offered through Steadfast Networks gives our Cloud Platform customers access to a lightweight, PHP-based internet discussion forum. PunBB provides you with the opportunity to create a community around your services or products that will allow your customers to communicate with each other and collaborate to solve their own issues, rather than bogging down your support staff with problems.

It is considered lightweight because PunBB was designed with speed and simplicity in mind, providing all of the features necessary for an active bulletin board community (XHTML-compliant output, intuitive user interface), but foregoing the difficult application, web server, and database setup of more graphic-intensive alternatives like vBulletin, Invision Power Board, and phpBB.

This very simplicity has attracted many people to PunBB, including Facebook’s Developers, who used a PunBB-powered forum for bug reports and discussions until September of 2011. They, along with many other organizations, liked having a bulletin board that was fast, easy to moderate, had source code anyone could understand, removed all the bells and whistles from the design, and didn’t put out gigantic, invalid XHTML pages.

In fact, PunBB is so spare that rather than a list of features, the creator offers a list of things he didn’t include in the program, such as:

private messaging
file attachments
polls
linking to off-site avatars
advanced text formatting controls
subforums

But this is where the beauty of PunBB as an open source application comes in. Though the designer opted to keep it sleek and spare, users have created any number of mods that can be added on to increase functionality, depending on your needs. And not surprisingly, many of their additions are the very things listed above – file attachments, polls, private messages. The difference with PunBB is that you get to choose what you want every step of the way.

How Can You Get PunBB Cloud Hosting from Steadfast Networks?

Steadfast Networks clients can get PunBB only if they utilize our Cloud Platform service, which starts at $20/month. One of the many benefits of the Steadfast Networks Cloud Platform is Jumpbox, which gives our customers access to dozens of useful open source applications, including PunBB.

To use PunBB through Jumpbox, Cloud Platform users should select the PunBB JumpBox template. Go to Operating System and select Ubuntu, then choose JumpBox PunBB. No complex setup or installation process.

System Requirements for PunBB Cloud Hosting

The system requirements for PunBB are relatively simple. Since it is written in PHP, it requires the PHP Hypertext Preprocessor.
A database to store forum data is also needed, so your system should have MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite.

Tips, Tricks, and Documentation

PunBB FAQs and documentation can be found on the project website, and forums where people are happy to help with tips and tricks are at: