What do you think of business sites that use forums not hosted on their own servers?

[GagHalfrunt]

Say a major e-tailer like Amazon or Buy.com had a users forum to get support and answers. What would you think if they used something like Delphi forums rather than having the forums hosted internally. Would you think it looked ghetto, cheap and classless and stay away or would you register and send your private info to some company not affiliated with Amazon or Buy.com

Cliff Notes: Would you think less of a company that outsourced or would you not even notice?

 

[Shawn]

Man I remember posting on Sharky Extreme's Delphi forums back when their site was one of the #1 review sites. Those were the days.

 

[kami333]

I think it depends, if it's some cheapy free hosting then :thumbsdown:
But just having some other company host it and have to take care of all the maintenance and backups, etc then I don't think it's that much of a problem. They shouldn't be in the business of maintaining a forum, they should be in the business of helping out users on the forum. Too many places try to do things internally when they could spend a lot less time and effort while getting better reliability by just outsourcing it.

 

[BurnItDwn]

as Kami said ... It depends .....

If a quality professional hosting company that does good work hosts it ..... then that's fine (as long is it isn't riddled with advertising all over the place)

If they are just another yahoo group .... or just another free forum, then blah ....
(or extremely overly abundantly filled with spam)

 

[RossMAN]

It depends on the business and what type of information is stored on their servers.

If it's a large eCommerce site (Amazon/Buy/NewEgg) I would expect them to have their own servers, data center and security precautions.

If it's a smaller store which has a web hosting account but doesn't store cc information (that's usually done through a third party cc processor or merchant account), I'm ok with that.

 

[Sketcher]

It's not an issue of whether or not I noticed, it's an issue of how well it is implemented.
I would rather a company outsource a forum if they're not able to do a good a job or if their internal resources would take staff from their main service to support it.

 

[skace]

I think it looks hands down more professional if it is all under the same domain.

 

[kami333]

Originally posted by: skace
I think it looks hands down more professional if it is all under the same domain.

Which is possible if they implement it correctly.