I'm currently running vBulletin 3.8 and curious if a 512 ram VPS can serve 250+ people at one time. For some reason I think it could easily handle 400 or more since I'm not hosting such files as videos.. music... just plain static text and pictures as all forums community does -LMN
not necessarily if your running cpanel: cpanel takes 128mb alone so having 256mb or more would be optimal.
No clue why my post was removed (mods care to elaborate?), but I had mentioned that a forum is not "plain, static text" per se, as the PHP all needs to be parsed by the server. It's a different beast than serving plain ol' HTML files, videos, music, etc. In any event, with a busy forum, chances are the CPU and disk i/o are going to be the limiting factors much more so than the RAM. 512mb should serve your needs just fine. As xcbh mentions, if you are planning on running cPanel, you cannot run it on 128mb of RAM. That would be quite bad. And in fact, 256mb is not optimal by any means. I personally would never run a cPanel VPS on less than 512. And of course, the nice thing about a VPS is that if your forum gets huge and you need more RAM, it's easy to upgrade. Good luck with the forum and VPS!