Questions Re: Forum Hosting Plan Requirements

I have two scenarios and I'm wondering if someone can give me a rough estimate of how much they think hosting would cost and what kind of plan would be required to run forums of each of these sizes:

Scenario 1:

50 active users
500 registered members
what is the approximate disk space needed?
what is the approximate bandwidth needed?
type of plan needed (shared, dedicated, etc)?
typical cost of plan?

Scenario 2:

200 Active Users
2,000 Registered Members
what is the approximate disk space needed?
what is the approximate bandwidth needed?
type of plan needed (shared, dedicated, etc)?
typical cost of plan?

This is an gossip/entertaiment forum and so a moderate amount pictures will be posted daily along with regular member posting and searching. PHPBB forum software.

Any appoximations you can give are appreciated.

Thanks!

 

I cannot tell you what kind of disk space or bandwidth will be needed. Each forum is different in this regard and number of members really has no impact on this. SOme forums have more guests that visit then others, some have members that look at more pageviews. Some have more images. A forum talking about porn is going to have more pics and page views then a forum about politics. Each forum is a bit unique. You also didnt talk about what kind of forum. vBulletin, phpbb, etc.

The good news - You dont need dedicated. I would start out shared - and if that is a problem, move up to a VPS. If you want to be sure, go to a VPS straightaway.

You can look here for more info: vBulletin Hosting

I hope that helps..

 

Thanks so much joeychgo. My forum will be closer to a site about politics. It's a gossip site, with not a huge amount of pictures being posted, but they will be posted occassionally.

I will also probably be using PHPBB or SMF at first.

Using Scenario 1, what is the cheapest plan you think I can get away with without running into problems:

I'm just going to use GoDaddy hosting as an example:

Deluxe
100 GB space
1000 GB transfer
$7/mo

Premium
200 GB space
2000 GB transfer
$15/mo

or would neither plan like this be adequate?

 

I'm looking at the VBulletin Hosting link and it's giving me a lot of good info. Thanks.

 

Your welcome. I would recommend vBulletin -- why start cheapo - then you have to figure everything out again later when you change to vBulleitn as your forum grows.

 

I second what joeychgo has posted earlier.. go for vbulletin if you can afford it. Vbulletin uses less resources if compared to phpBB (modified) so you will save some money on hosting expenses in the long term.

 

Thanks so much for the advice both of you.

 

Not only that, but I believe you should build for success -- If successful, your forum will need to be on vBulletin at some point, might as well start now. Plus - if you get an owned license -- You can always sell it if you need to and get most of your money back.

 

One of my forums uses VB, 150active daily, 1500 registered, use 600 MB bandwidth daily, site is around 250mb, over 190,000 posts, and the DB is pretty big in size , but dont remember how big off hand

 

Yes, if you have money, i suggest you to go on the vbulletin way too..

 

Disagree with you on this.
You don't have to get a vB license to run a succesfull forum.

 

Im not saying you HAVE to - but lets face facts - most of your sucessful forums end up on vBulletin.

According to Big-Boards.com - more then half of the 2000 large forums they have are run on vBulletin - the other 45% or so is spread across all the other kinds of software with Invision in second place at about 10% of the big boards out there.

There are reasons for this....

 

I would get a VPS for Scenario #1 (cost: $40-$50 per/month for a decent managed VPS plan). For Scenario #2, I couldn't tell you because I unfortunately don't manage a forum this busy