I'm toying with setting up a vBulletin forum at my www.cheesy-movies.com site, and wanted to pick some brains around here about hosting a bulletin board. My main concern is the likely size of the MySQL database for a moderately popular forum, as well as likely bandwidth considerations. I'm eyeing up some UK hosting which mentions 150mb MySQL and then charges for extra blocks of database. Say I succeeded in getting a forum with maybe 1500 members and fairly regular posting (200-300 posts a day?) - how big could I expect MySQL DB and bandwidth bills to get? Does anyone know of any webhosts that specialise in hosting vBulletin boards, because to be fair I only want basic hosting without all the mailboxes and extras - just enough to host the site and some fairly basic HTML stuff. Any suggestions welcomed - I'm not interested in alternative bb software as I like vBulletin best - and its seems an easy one to set up for a relative php newb like myself.
The database size of this forum is about 200MB (5,625 users, 159,150 posts and 14,355 threads), if that helps at all.
DO NOT GO TO A HOST THAT SPECIALIZES IN VBULLETIN! You will be put on a server that is overloaded. PERIOD! anywho, that's my two cents on that. Take into consideration attachments too. If you use attachments, consider using the file system and the DB will be spared the work and the size.
That's a massive help - I was imaging this was in the gigabytes! I've done some digging around and now see I have little to fear as I'd be amazed if the forum I'm planning got a fraction of the users this place has. noppid - thanks for that advice - I think I will stick with the host I have as I think it will be up to it, my main concern was how big a database I was going to get - I also like the look of www.asmallorange.com as thewebjunkie pointed out - they seem to offer a good service. Thanks for all the replies.