Creating a Forum for My Work: VBulletin & Bandwidth Considerations

[montoyas7940]

I am interested in creating a forum for people at my work. My intent is for it to be used as a clearing house for information during these turbulent times in the auto industry.

I am not sure these questions belong here and I apologize if they do not.

I know that this forum uses vbulletin. It is a commercial software package only available for purchase, correct?

Has the forum always used vbulletin or have others been tried?

It it hosted on a commercial server?

I understand that PF volume is unique but how much bandwidth is typically used? Could it be supported with a residential cable connection?

 

[mgb_phys]

vbulletin (www.vbulletin.com) is around $200
There are a lot of free forum software packages. phpBB is probably the most common just because php is well known and lots of companies host it. Hosted php sites are only around $5-10/month

I'm guessing PF would max out a domestic connection!
Some companies block incoming http to a domestic connection and you normally have a dynamic IP address so you would have to do some extra work to point a DNS name at it.