I am hoping to open an online community but I don't really know where to start. Can anybody help me?

1. Make a clear understanding on what online community you want to start. Are they going to be based on some hobby, like community for trekking etc, or are they just for your family and friends. If you want to include only your family and friends, then skip to step X





2. Find out if there are similar communities existing online already. There might already be some successful community around for a long time. If there is one, then make sure that you have something different to offer your members. Else people won't join your community.





3. Now decide on how the community should look. Do you want a forum kind of thing or do you want a social networking site. Either way, you will get free opensource softwares for creating your community. If you plan to create forums you can use phpbb. If you plan for an online social networking site like orkut, you can use community management softwares (cms) like Drupal, Joomla etc. (Search google for these terms). All of them are free and opensource with good community support.





4. Now get a good hosting service. Make sure that they support whatever software (forum or cms) you want to host. For beginning you might want to go for shared hosting. Once your community picks up, you can go for dedicated hosting or any other advanced hosting. Remember, many hosting services offer 100s of gbs of webspace and bandwidth. But in reality it maynot be so. Check out reviews about the hosting site before you sign up with anyone.





I use hostpc/yareo for my hosting. So far seems to be good in terms of service.

I am hoping to open an online community but I don't really know where to start. Can anybody help me?
Yahoo has many, many online communities and they are free to start up. Here's the link to get started:





http://groups.yahoo.com
Reply:well first you need a website, you will either need a web designer or you can probably buy a basic one, though managing things like login functions is tricky, so start reading up on it. You will need to get hosting for your site, you can start small, but make sure you make your website a setup thats easy to transfer to something bigger if the time comes.


You will need to keep up to date on how to keep all the spammers, robots and hackers out, A simple google search is a good start.


Then obviously you need to start drawing in people to go on it, so find similar communities and draw people across.


Try and incorporate space in your web design for adverts, that way the site start to fund itself. Google adsense is the best way to go in the beginning. I suggest you go to a store or library and get some books on the scripting and maintenance for these sorts of sites if you don't have a person who can maintain it 24 hours a day for you.


Good Luck