Hi forum owners! I'm thinking on launching two vBulletin-based forums, SEO Forum and Chrome Forum. In a year or earlier I plan the growth to 1k users in any given time counting both forums. Wanted to know if VPS hosting will be able to handle that many users online. The VPS I'm thinking of is the one by Lunarpages, 512MB RAM, 20GB disk space, and 1000GB of bandwidth. Thanks for advice!
Hi there, No, with that many users, and running vbulletin, you are going to need a lot more RAM than that. I would suggest 4gb or ram.
A VPS will not handle that kind of traffic, especially with 2 or 3 forums and blogs running on the same server. I HIGHLY suggest you get a dedicated server with at least 2 gigs of memory. I personally use Future Hosting for my dedicated server needs. Right now I'am leasing a dual core dedicated server with 4 gigs of memory. On that server I run 3 vbulletin forums and 5 wordpress blogs.
if the traffic is huge in future, you would be better to choose dedicated server at the beginning stage first.
Right now I run my biggest site (1.3 million posts, 8500 daily posts, 80k members, 500 online) with 3 servers but I know I need at least 2 of them. I have to be honest though. Why do you need high specs? The reality is that most forums fail in the first 6 months or at least that's when the admin gives up. Even if they keep the forum running it's a ghost town and they have moved on. Reality- Get a strong shared host like Hostgator or Dreamhost at about $10 a month. Start your forums, see if you can make them a success and move them to a VPS or Dedicated once you know they are moving in the right direction. It's very easy to move a forum. This could also save you hundreds if not thousands of dollars which could in turn be used to promote your site (paid posting, giveaways, link buying, adwords). I applaud you though on having 2 great domain names. I myself snagged GCOSforum(s).com. I hope to get that launched the month of the beta release. Having a great domain is a plus but it's not an automatic means to success. I can give you dozens of amazing $xx,xxx forum domain names with inadequate admins without a clue. http://www.hostgator.com/shared.shtml 20% off coupon right now too. Any of those plans will probably be good for at least 6 months of running your forum. The great thing about hostgator is that they will probably help you move the site if indeed you upgrade your account with them. Goodluck.