My forum has gotten to the point that my shared hosting account was suspended for using too many resources. We managed to crash not only our own site but also about 99 others because too many people were posting and viewing the forum at one time. The forum was started a little over 2 years ago and now is very active.

For all those looking to start a forum from scratch, here's how I did it.

First I started with a plain html site about a very niche topic. Something that the average person on the street has never heard of. As far as I know, mine was the first English speaking site on the Internet covering the topic. Then I put up as much information about the topic that I knew, which wasn't much at the time. I put my email address on the site and encouraged people to ask questions. Questions started coming in and soon I realized that the same questions were being asked over and over. So, I started a forum on the site to answer the questions one time for all.

The first topics on the forum were started by me, something like, "I get asked all the time about.... Here's an explanation." Instead of "fixing" my plain html site so it covered all these additional topics, I put the answers on the forum instead and left the main site somewhat cryptic, so the visitor was left curious and wanting to learn more. Have a question? Visit our forum! I didn't wait for visitors to actually start asking questions on the forum, I just started answering questions that I knew many of them had, because of emails I had received.

To sum up, I started a site on an obscure topic, I left many questions unanswered on the main site, I answered those questions on the forum. Slowly, I started adding sections to the forum and to the main site to cover more mainstream topics. Now we have a true online community.