hello guys, what is the best webhost to start a vbulletin forum? shared hosting, VPS, dedicated? can someone differentiate dedicated and VPS in terms of benefits?
Well if it's a completely new forum a shared hosting should be fine. I suggest going small and slowly upgrading when you need to. Doing that will save you much money.
To start with shared hosting is enough once you pick up traffic its good to move to a good vps or dedicated server
I agree with two answers above, but i'm still confuse in determine a "big forum" that suit to at least a VPS in terms of members. In other words , how many members that we should consider to move from a shared host to a VPS ?
On the busiest time of the day, my forum has 70-80 members. I haven't felt any slowdown in page loading - yet. I am sure I will have to go for VPS any time soon. Still trying to find the max users online to warrant vps. Sorry if that was off-topic for this thread.
80 members shown is still working fine on shared hosting. It also depends on how long you set for session time. We have default vBulletin forums with 150+ members online working on our shared hosting environment just fine.
There are many factors to how many a shared host can handle for a forums. Part is the host and your account specs. Then you have the software itself and how you have managed it. You can also consider the activity of the forums. Normally stuff like search is the most resource intense. Basically run it on shared hosting until your provider complains or your forum members do. You can go farther than you think with a $10 a month shared hosting account. It's also a lot less headaches than the VPS or Dedi. Once you start that route you realize how much you don't know. It will also jump your expenses as even cheap VPS is $40 a month and dedi's are $80+ for something decent but more like $100-$200. That's a huge difference from $100 shared hosting will cost for a whole year.
If you have a small forum then use shared hosting and any time if no. of people increases online more than 50 and your site is becoming very slow then upgrade to Vps with at least 1GB of bustable memory.
Its better to have atleast a VPS for the v bulleting forum which will give you freedom to install any software and other parameters
VPS is overrated. It's not very different from shared hosting really. VPS is fine IF you really need it but 99% of sites don't.
You are completely wrong. VPS is nothing compared to Shared Hosting. You get your own dedicated RAM and CPU usage along with root access to install any programs you may need.
VPS is a machine that's split up into smaller virtual machines. Each virtual machine is like it's own computer. However most VPS plans are slim on resources...256k ram type deals. Most shared hosting are on super servers where resources are HUGE. 8GB or more ram and CPUs that are dual quad-cores or more. VPS will certainly give you more control but that also means headaches. Most VPS plans start at $20 for crap and go up to $100 or more for good ones. For $60-$120 you can get a dedicated that's better hardware. I know the exact differences and performance wise to cost it's not a good deal. For $20 or $30 you can get amazing shared hosting. Check webhostingtalk.com for similar opinions. I would recommend a VPS in certain situations but overall I think a jump from Shared hosting to Dedicated makes more sense.
Start with the smallest but cheapest cplan you can find. Upgrading a web hosting package now is very easy and most webhosts could do this for you no hassel.
first go with small vps solution then grow and go for larger solutions i.e. semi dedicated and dedicated
i think a forum earns less that blogs in average. so there are chances your forum already have members but still earnings are not enough to buy VPS.
A good VPS can be purchased with that you can also get installing scripts with control panel, for a forum the best option is to go for a VPS with at least 512 MB RAM