Hey guys, if I want to start a vbulletin forum, what should I get for hosting? and I'd like it to get a couple thousand uniques a day and keep on growing, maybe get it to like 50,000 a day. I have no clue how much space I would be using or anything of the sort, any advice would be appreciated. thanks
In my opinion, to make sure you don't waste money, I would start out with a nice Business account from HostGator.com for a little over $12.95/month which provides virtually unlimited bandwidth, and space (I think 999999GB for each)... but limited CPU and Memory usage, just start with this, and if your business/site kicks off, pay for the next best thing from HostGator (or another hosting site), which would be a dedicated server... as the business/site grows, let your server grow, there no point in spending hundreds of dollars a month on an amazing, dedicated server, when you don't know i you'll need all of it or not.
If you are looking at 50,000 visitors per day you should go for a VPS or Dedicated option. Check out Liquid Web, HostGator, Lunarpages, MidPhase, and A2Hosting.
Well the startup cost is $180 to buy the vBulletin software, then you should start off on shared hosting, Hawkhost do cheap hosting accounts then once your website reaches alot of uniques a day and visitors, then just contact there support to upgrade to a VPS, they help with everything and are reasonably priced and trust me, they are one of the best hosts out there
Use dedicated server if you want 50,000 UV per day. But first you must start up with the shared hosting so that your money is not wasted. find out first if your forum is get more people then if succeed, upgrade your hosting to dedicated server..
I'd start with a cheap shared hosting plan, if possible on a 1-3 month at-at-time basis. A few thousand uniques a day should be no problem (this may vary though, depending upon the strain on the database and other factors). You can buy GoDaddy's for something like $4.xx per month, the minimum length option is 3 months but you can actually lower it to 2 months once you're in the shopping cart. With a coupon, I think it can be dropped down slightly, but still in the low $4.xx range. You also get a $1.99 domain with the hosting purchase! When I did this, I think I paid $10.xx for the domain plus two months of hosting. You can always upgrade to a server-level quality of host, and it should be no financial burden if you've only invested in a few months of shared hosting (rather than 12 months that many places require). No one knows whether your forum will grow, and how much. Why start paying around $100 or more per month when it could just be thrown out the window?