ProBoards Provides New White-Label Internet Forum Hosting Service

ProBoards is a provider of free forum hosting on the Internet, and it gets over 40 million visitors a month. Now, that number will likely increase with the launch of Forums.net.

The new service is ProBoards’ managed white-label Internet forum hosting service targeted for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), as well as other organizations. It lets these businesses provide their own Internet forum.

Monthly plans start at $9.99. Among its other benefits are no PG-13 content restrictions, it has integrated log-in and registration pages, it has single sign-on and unlimited plug-in keys, and it has SSL secured encryption. It also has Google analytics integration.

Data can be transferred from a ProBoards forum or another forum platform. Forums.net is powered by ProBoards Version 5 software.

Forums made via Forums.net are pre-optimized for social media sharing and search engine optimization. And each Forums.net forum can be customized to fit an existing website design.

"SMBs typically have limited resources and need a cost-effective way to successfully engage and support customers, which is why we created Forums.net," Patrick Clinger, president and CEO of ProBoards, said in a statement. "With Forums.net, they can establish their own Internet forum to fully and intimately collaborate with their customers – something that our research has shown is lacking from other platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Our new platform provides a fully managed solution that's the easiest way to create a forum catered specifically to an SMB's needs without having to deal with managing servers and software. By taking all the stress and difficulty out of setting up and maintaining a direct line of customer communication, we allow businesses to focus on communication, not the toolset that facilitates it."

In other recent company news, ProBoards has made available Forum Analytics. It provides statistics for businesses including daily page-views, threads created, posts made and new user registrations, according to a company blog post.