Makestation's blue color scheme shall be replaced soon. I've recently purchased a theme from Audentio, and plan on customizing it over the next couple of weeks. Makestation is going to have a completely fresh look and feel altogether, and I think you guys will love the changes.

I also plan on tweaking the existing theme a bit, and maybe even releasing it down the road. It was designed exclusively for Makestation, but I have a feeling we'll be done with it once the new one rolls in. (Chances are, I'll tweak the original "submatrix" rather than the "2014 dev" version that we're currently on. )

Anyway, anyone have any suggestions for the new site design? Feel free to post them here!

So when was the last time you ever used a VHS player?

It's been years since I've even had one, so I have not used one in a while. I actually do not have a blu ray player yet though. Maybe when I get my laptop...

Unless you're going the free forum hosting route, the costs of running a forum can go through the roof pretty quickly. With cheap hosting and a decent domain provider, you should be able to get hosting + a domain for around $70/year, which isn't bad, but that doesn't include any costs for premium themes, plugins, etc...

Personally, I'm budgeting around $100/year for the hosting + the domain, and an additional $50-60/month for plugins and themes. ($17 spent already for 2014 )

What do you typically budget for your forums and websites?

Are you looking for a high-quality, inexpensive webhost with a good reputation? There are a few hosts that I have some experience with that I can very strongly recommend. Of course I always recommend doing your own research to ensure that you find something that works for you, but the following may be worth taking a look at.

Shared Hosting: T1hosting.com

T1hosting is probably by far the best low-cost budget host that I have found as of yet, and has great uptime, reliability, and service. Their gold plan currently offers unlimited domains setup and 1TB of bandwidth for $5/month if paid annually. (Yes, some hosts offer "unlimited" bandwidth, but few of them will actually stick to that if you start using a lot of bandwidth. )

They also have some very inexpensive plans. A quick look at their homepage, and you can literally pay less than $2/month for sufficient hosting for not just one, but multiple websites. Not a deal that's easy to find with many webhosts. If you're looking for the best "bang for your buck," I'd strongly recommend taking a look at their plans.

VPS hosting: Ramnode

Makestation is proudly hosted with Ramnode currently. They are a highly reliable unmanaged VPS provider with great packages, uptime, service, and support for a very low cost. I host quite a lot on this server, and it has never had any issues whatsoever. All I can say is that I'm quite impressed. It's definitely worth a look.

Free forum hosting: Icyboards

Icyboards one of the best free forum hosts that I have found to date. They offer a wide variety of plugins, great uptime, high performance, etc... and allow you to upload your own themes and edit your templates. They even allow you to move the ads around so that they look good with your theme! Now that's something you don't see often.

In any case, Icyboards is a pretty solid free host. If you don't want to go the paid hosting route, they are worth looking at. Createaforum.com and smfnew.com (which is now under new ownership) are both worth looking at as well if you prefer SMF-based hosting.

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If you have any good experiences with any webhosts not listed here, feel free to post your experiences below to help the community of fellow webmasters here!

-Darth

Awful at intros. The name is Chris, I take pictures.

As many of you know, Makestation's custom theme has been a work in progress for several months. The conversion to MyBB didn't start off with the grandest of designs (look at the "landscapes" theme in your User CP, then ignore the broken header to get an idea) and has certainly "progressed" since then.

Anyway, what are your thoughts on the current theme for Makestation? What are some things that you would like to see added/improved to the forum and/or the design?

I'm currently looking for an alternative to iTunes, primarily because the idea of paying $1.29 for a track I could probably get for 99 cents doesn't sound that appealing to me.

What music stores do you use? Are there any that could be recommended over iTunes?

Alright, so the competition has come down to its breaking point. If you could only eat at Taco Bell or McDonalds for the next week, which would you choose?

Be sure to vote in the poll!

This is apparently not breaking news, but Ubuntu's dash searches are getting sent to various third parties to allow Ubuntu to cater advertisements towards you. Sounds innocent, but the idea of getting all sorts of advertisements on my desktop is just eh... I'd almost rather pay for Windows.

Ubuntu has great potential, but a lot of their recent decisions seem to have me wondering. If there is a website that is quite literally dedicated to showing users how to disable features that invade your privacy, there is an issue.

How do you feel about Ubuntu's recent decisions regarding privacy?

Promotion forums have been around for quite a while, giving webmasters a place to advertise their forums and to get webmaster support, post exchanges, design reviews, etc...

While the idea seems promising, many have also found them to have widely varying degrees of success with their forums. What is your opinion of promotion forums?