To install and run an XMB forum, your web host must include both MySQL and PHP support with your account. These are essential in running the forum software. If your hoster does not have these available, check the "Hosting" forum on XMB http://www.xmbforum.com/community/forums. Members regularly post "finds" or offer hosting.
XMB uses about 1 MB of disk space once installed. Most forums will use less than 20 MB of disk space between the PHP files and database usage, and use less than 100 MB of network bandwidth a month. Careful attention to pruning old posts can keep total disk space to acceptable levels for light usage.
XMB 1.9.5 is very CPU efficient compared to previous versions, and compares very favorably to other forum software. Most hosts should not see any significant load from XMB until large numbers of users are active on a single host (such as about 200 simultaneous users).
A busy forum with 2,500 users, 125,000 posts, 20,000 attachments, and 35,000 U2U's uses about 400 MB of disk space, and will normally consume about 20-25 Gb of bandwidth per month. You should be on a dedicated server with this level of activity.
Most web hosts will use Apache. However, XMB is compatible with any web server capable of running PHP, which includes Windows 2000�s Personal Web Server, IIS 5, 5.1 (Windows XP) and 6 (Windows 2003), and Apache 1.3.x and 2.0.x under both Unix and Windows.
XMB recommends the latest version of Apache 2.0, suitably hardened and tuned for running forum software. Luckily, this is the web server of choice for most web hosts. If you have any queries about web server configuration, ask your web host for more details about their configuration.
For high traffic forums, please see section XXX for tuning recommendations.
XMB stores your forum data, such as posts, threads, and attachments in a database. XMB uses the freely available MySQL database for data storage and fast searching. MySQL is available both as a free version and as a commercially supported version, depending on your needs.
XMB uses fairly straightforward SQL queries, so the minimum support version of MySQL required is the rather old 3.00, but this is not recommended. MySQL 3.0 is slow and has many bugs fixed by later versions of both 3.x and 4.0.x branches.
For maximum performance, security and stability, XMB recommends the latest current 4.0.x branch. If you are running a very busy forum (more than 100,000 hits a day), you should be running only the latest version 4.0.x and asking your hoster to help you with MySQL tuning (see section XXX).
XMB is written in PHP, a very common scripting language. PHP is far from ideal in many ways � it is slow, it has a very long history of being insecure, and it chews a lot of resources when things get busy. However, practically every web host has it available, so you should be able to get XMB to run with your preferred ISP or web host.
To use XMB 1.9.5, you will need at least PHP version 4.2.0, but the absolute latest version of XMB (such as 4.4.2 or 5.1.2 at the time of writing) are recommended.
N PHP versions prior to 4.3.4 are essentially insecure and not recommended. Future versions of XMB may not support PHP earlier than 4.3.4.
XMB works just fine with PHP5 and is supported. XMB 1.9 does not take advantage of any new PHP 5.0 features. PHP 5.0 is faster and more secure, so if you run a busy forum, you should be using PHP 5.0 or later, preferably with a PHP accelerator. If you run a busy forum, please see high performance XMB for more details.
Being the administrator of an XMB forum requires a bit of massaging, and some additional programs make working with XMB that much easier.
FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is the most common method of uploading to hosters. Better hosters support the use of secure copy (scp), a portion of the secure shell (ssh) protocol suite, which if you have available, you should use. FTP transmits your username and password and all data without encryption. If you are security conscious, you probably will not be using FTP. For more details regarding scp, please see the next section.
There are several good, free FTP clients out there - here are a few you could check out:
Another suggestion is a good text editor. PHP files require a plain text editor - don't use your Cpanel File Manager, MSWord or any other word processor for the editing of your files.
Probably the best "free" text editor is Crimson Editor - http://crimsoneditor.com/