Hey guys, I didnt know where to place this. Anyways, my question is that when is it a good time move to a dedicated host if you run a forum? I recently did massive advertising for my forum which just opened last friday and I already have a total of 1,500+ members and 7000+ post. My forum is growing fast but I do not know when is a good time to move to a dedicated host. So I was wondering if you guys can tell me whens the best time to move to a dedicated host? Also my other question is, when do you know when you have a big board? Is it when you reach 1million post?
i decided to move as soon as i could see that page load-times too slow. if you aren't experiencing any problems (slow page loads, database crashes, etc) then maybe you don't need to move just yet..
The number depends on who you host with. If you host with a large bulk hosting company, they will usually have lower limits like 15 mySQL connections at once. With the lower limits you run into, "connections exceeded" errors. Slow performance is also an indicator of a good time to move. There is no set limit because different users might be requesting at different times and there are different SQL loads depending on content and forum software used.. I think a decent rule of thumb is when you have "50 on-line" users at once based upon a 15 minute window you should start considering an upgrade. Again different providers do different things here. After you are through with these lower end shared hosting plans, there are higher end sharing options availble such as "application hosting", "clustered hosting". Generally you will get better performance and more users, with my GUESS being 100 users online in the 15 minute window. Above this, you can get Managed Hosting or VPS. Beware of low end VPS' as they might have even worse performance than your shared hosting. Finally, with 300/400 users on-line in a 15 minute window, you can move to Dedicated servers and then server clusters for mega boards.
i dont suggest any body to use "virtual host" . i think there is no difference between "virtual host" and "shared hosting" . if you are thinking to move a server, i suggest you to choose dedicate server
Actually, with a virtual host (at least at PowWeb, back when i used them) there was a big difference. On their shared hosting, the MySQL servers were remote from the web-servers. it was because of this that the page-load times on CMS's or any database-heavy applications were so bad. On their Virtual Hosts, the webserver and database servers were on the same box, so Sql performance is way better..