In fact, almost every major network (AOL, MSN, and Yahoo!) has a section dedicated to chat rooms.

But perhaps you want to create your own chat website because you have better ideas or because you would manage the chat rooms better. Or maybe you want to add chat to your existing forum or community based website.

Creating your own chat website or adding chat capability to your website is not difficult. Using the right PHP scripts and add-ons, you could create a chat website surprisingly easily.

You can choose a commercial solution or a free solution.

If you don’t want to spend a lot of time fixing technical problems, you should get a commercial solution because it comes with tech support. On the other hand, you can use a free solution and try to get help from other users or hire someone from Elance, for example, to fix your issues.

I would advise that you get a solution with tech support because you should focus on managing your community and let other people handle the problems and the technical stuff behind running a chat community.

I will give you all of your options, though: free and paid. Here goes…

Commercially Supported PHP Chat Software

There’s only one noteworthy commercial chat script around. It is 123 Flash Chat. It comes with professional technical support and it is regularly maintained.

123 Flash Chat

123 Flash Chat is highly configurable and extensible chat software for your website. It supports video and audio chat. The developers have focused on making sure that their software is capable of handling high volume usage. It has rich administrative features.

You can also download it and try it for free before you buy it.

Integration

It seamlessly integrates with other systems like Joomla, Drupal, vBulletin, phpBB and many others.

Technical Support

There are multiple channels of support with this script. You can submit a request via the ticketing system, you can use email, or you can utilize the community forum. The developers of the software maintain a support forum where they help users. I really like transparent community support like this.

Visit 123 Chat Website for More Information

Free PHP Chat Software

On the other hand, if you’d like to go for a free PHP chat software. Here’s a selection of your available options — most popular at the top:

• Userplane (ad-supported) – http://www.userplane.com/
• PHP Free Chat – http://www.phpfreechat.net/
• PHP Open Chat – http://www.phpopenchat.org/
• X7 Chat – http://x7chat.com/

Again, if you’re not sure how to use or install these scripts, you can hire someone to do the dirty work for you affordably on Elance.

Or if you have a general question, feel free to ask in the comments below.