What kind of things should I look for in a hosting package if I want to host a phpbb forum for 1000+ members with 100x100px avatars? How much bandwidth? How much space? How much databases? What else should I have?
not much for the regular users. You need lot more for the spammers. If are serious about your forum, go to VBulliten. I had to close down some of my forums, as I could not control spam. (PHPbb) Thanks
Just because you don't know how to take care of spambots doesn't mean someone needs to automatically go to VB. Get a host with at least 100 megs of space to start out with, a database, at least 10 gigs of bandwidth, and plan to upgrade if your forum becomes popular. As for spambots there are plenty and plenty of hacks and mods to take care of these nasty little buggers out there - some that disallow the posting of URLs until a certain post count is reached. Highly flexible and can integrate with Wordpress and Coppermine gallery, not to mention the ability to customize customize customize. It all depends on where you want to go. If you do plan an image gallery consider more than 100 megs, perhaps the hatchling plan at hostgator - that looks to be a good one. They upgrade and are cheap, also the only reliable host I have had so far. an example of integration would be my own Jackuul Empire site - although I have the gallery closed until I can get my scanner running at full speed ahead again. I have to rescan about 20-30 lovely hand drawn pictures by my extremely untalented hands - and then find my 30 or so propaganda pictures.
For a new forum about 200mb webspace and 3gig bandwith should be enough. No need to pay for more if you don't use it yet Just find a host where upgrading your plan is easy, so you can always get more space or bandwith once you need it.
Don’t pay much attention to webspace or bandwidth, what you should be looking at is how fast the servers are. My suggestion is to start out with shared hosting with the like of knownhost or asmallorange.
If you think your forum is going to grow big, I would go with 200MB+, even more if you are using vBulletin because it has more features and uses up more space on the server, and if you have lots of modifications like arcade, the games, scores, comments, etc. etc. etc. on that will take up even more space, so the more the better. In terms of bandwidth, it all depends on the amount of users you get. I would recommend a plan from a host that you have researched a lot, check reviews. I have a plan at HostGator for my arcade website and had one for a forum I owned in the past and the space on the $10 per month plan was well over enough for me, with an active user base. I'm not saying HostGator is the only good host though, there are many more. Siteground, even 1and1 is okay.