Hello, I currently run a pretty small forum, on a free host. I started it on a free host just to get it going and to see how it went. It is starting to take off now. I am currently paying a hosting company to host some of my sites. How much bandwidth/space do you think is needed each month for a vB forum w/ around 500 members and 10k posts? How about 1000 members and 20k posts? I want to get a general idea so I know whether I should upgrade, get my own server, etc. Any suggestions/tips are appreciated. Thanks
You can use a host like forumhoster and it costs 5$ a year i suppose with most of the features . Or a good web host for a forum would be about 3-7$ per month .
It's not about how many registered users you have. It's about how many Users and Guests are online simultaneously on the board and how many requests/second to the forums database they make.
Purchase the cheapest dedicated hosting you can find. Ask how much additional bandwidth cost once you exceed your limit. Try siteground.com To estimate, you can look at your Google Adsense account, your cpanel, pretty much anything that shows you where traffic comes from.... Take the highest day and the lowest day...add them together, then divide... Then one you get an average of traffic a day, divide them up into hours, then minutes... Fairly easy... I run my board on it and it is fairly cheap. Dedicated IP. I have 6,000+ members 25,000+ posts 16,000 + threads.
According to the data you are mentioning I think you will need 5 GB to 10 GB Bandwidth per month. This is average data based on some experiences from the past. But it can fluctuate. One good shared host would also do right now. You can move later on when you hit 50,000 posts to a small dedicated server. Try optimizing the page size and image size on the forum and it will save a lot of resources.
Adding to this, you can add up all the different traffic amounts each day for one month and then divide by 30.... This will give you the average amounts of traffic....
With 1k members, I would say you almost have to upgrade to paid hosting. You can find many great hosting deals that would suit your needs for $5 or so per month.
For files and data transfer try Webalizer: http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/ For SQL (database) queries/sec (or average SQL queries in the last 5:15:60min) I'd recommend asking admin of your host. AFAIK Joomla (if we're talkin' about the sites from your sig) don't have such ACP Module.
It all depends on the host. When I was on an ASO shard plan, I had 3 active forums on my shared. They managed that server well. Some hosts dont manage servers as well.
Okay, great, thanks. I plan on doing a database saving to convert over to vB. I.F. makes that hard, and costs quite a bit of money. However, it should be worth it in the end.
Well siteground disabled the backup function in cpanel, should we ever move our sites, it's gonna be lots of fun (not) if you have a large site. They should list somewhere on their website that this important and much used function, is disabled, I would not have bought a plan with them had I known in advance.
I can do back-ups with no problem..... Where exactly are you referring to? I do back-ups via phpmadmin....
In cpanel you can normally click a "backup" button and it takes you to a page where you can download everything, mail, files and more. On siteground, the phpmyadmin backups will freeze/stall because of their timeout limit (if you have a large database) I am having problems with lately.
Oh wow, you know, now that I think about it, I don't think they ever had it........lol... I know they do back-ups which they keep, but that is a hassle. I got u know...
You could try to download only part of the DB at one time, if you have not tried this yet? Choose only 1/2 - 1/3 or 1/4 of the tables in phpmyadmin and than click save file. Do you have ftp access to the webspace? You could get the page files that way if you do! This is not a good set up for a dynamic website that is ever changing. Yes they should make people more aware that there set up will not allow people to back up there files. I just went through a similar thing with a host that I paid a year in advance for, although after the first month, access to the CP became about 45% and is now defunct. I recommend getting your files off the kindergarten server any way possible and place them on a real, more reliable plan. Noting is more frustrating to spend countless hours of work on a webpage, only to find out that the files are now inaccessible, non transferable or on a host that does not enable important features. Boulder
Boulder, I know all the other ways to get a backup, I was making a point that they disabled a basic feature and shouldn't have just cause they want to get people to pay them to do it. Yeah, before the site gets even bigger I better be moving it, good point.