Hi, Friends I am running a forum site on vbulletin, load at peak time on this site is 200 concurrent user. Currently I hosted this site with shared hosting provider and facing some performance issue. Can you please tell me if I am doing right I mean hosting this site on shared server ? Should I host it on dv or dedicated server ? Also if some one is running site with almost same load, can you please tell me what should be the server configuration. Thanks
Depends on if you have customizations/mods installed more than anything. But 200 concurrent users is probably around the point you should be looking at getting a dedicated machine and not sharing resources with other sites.
200 users - you should be able to get away with a high end Virtual Private Server (VPS). Once you start getting 300+ users at a time, you might want to seriously consider a dedicated server solution.
Wow, I'm suprised that your shared host has allowed you to have a vbulletin board that big with them. Depending on how much you streamline your server (optimize PHP, Apache, MySQL etc) you could get away with a high end VPS, without optimizing then you should look at a dedicated server. My opinion would be to go for a dedicated server and give room for your site to grow.
Thanks a lot friends for helping me out here, I think I can go with DV server right now. But I am still confused with money making. Like my site just make $5-$6 a day, with this many users, is it normal? What are the ways I can increase its revenue without troubling users with more ads and surveys. [If this is not the right place to ask this question please suggest me the right place and i will create new post there]. Thanks
For a website with about 200 users online at the moment, a VPS should do quite well for you with sufficient amount of RAM. A vbulletin forum does take quite alot of load, although there are optimization tools which will help you make the website run smoothly on your VPS. A VPS is shared only between a few users and have equal resources divided for every user. If you overload the server at that point, you can upgrade to a dedicated server. You can always upgrade from a lower stage to a upper stage if needed. All you might have to do is pay for the upgrade fee and nothing much. With the earning of 5$ on an average, you should do really well with a VPS. A dedicated server would normally start from 50-60$/mo depending it being onshore of offshore.
Thanks a load Flamer for providing me a great detailed information. I am able to make up my mind and i will go for VPS server with 1 GB ram [i think i will be enough]. It looks like you have very good knowledge information about servers and server hosting. Thanks Again.