Hello everyone... I a quick question for everyone...

I use about 40gigs of bandwidth a month, and I only need about 500MBs of hard drive space. However, the biggest problem comes down to my vBulletin. In one year, the forum had 1,300 new members and I'm averaging about 60-130 people online at once.

I used to be a VO customer; however, I had to leave because of their cost of their semi-dedicated and dedicated servers. Now that I left them, I see why they are so highly recommended. The host I am with now (not going to mention their name) is pretty slow, and for some reason they always suspend my account when the server load goes any higher than four. And they don't suspend it for a couple of minutes... I'm talking hours. I was with VO for one year, on their virtual plan, and they NEVER ever e-mailed me about the server load. I am now on a semi-dedicated with this new host, and they always complain to me about this. They always tell me that I "need to go dedicated."

Oh well, I may need to go dedicated, I am not sure. However, I do not plan to go dedicated with my current host as they haven't impressed me at all.

Anyways, I am looking for a server that can handle my website. I know for a fact that a Celeron processor wouldn't be able to handle the site. However, I simply can not afford the price of a P4 2.4 or something like that.

So, any recommendations? Do you think I can go with a better hosting company and stick with a VPS plan? Please let me know.

Anyways, thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.

A VPS depends on the server it runs on, a good host running vps's on a dual xeon box with lots of ram would not raise an eyebrow to 40Gb transfer with a vbulletin site :)

Dedicated is always better, mind you.

you'd be fine on your own dedicated celeron. You're not as big as you think. :cool:

Agreed - a slow pentium III or celeron 1Ghz would very amply meet your needs, such a machine with 256/512Mb ram would easily handle a few hundred GB per month without breaking a sweat.

Are we all sure about that? I mean, I know I've spoke to sales man, but they all told me that a Celeron simply couldn't handle the site...

Thanks for all the input so far... I really appreciate it...

A friend of mine runs a busy forum site which pushes 180GB per month. It runs on a Cobalt Raq3i with 512Mb RAM. The cobalt has a 300/350Mhz (?) processor. A 1Ghz Celeron would mop the floor with it! :)

HTH! Steve

A new Celeron will handle that fine..

what the previous ppl have said, 60-130 users on at once will be handled fine by a celery.

A RAQ4 with 512mb RAM would even treat you pretty well, with room to grow. I was using mine for hosting a completely dynamic auction site with about 9,000 registered users (pushing about 40 - 60gb / month) + some smaller download sites and it handled it great with a little tweaking.

Plus, the control panel is pretty easy for a beginner and that combined with a good company supporting it, you'd be doing ok.

If i may add to this ?


I'm goin to say two thing's i advise you...

Get the Anything Goes Holiday Package - Ensim -setup $1.00 mo. $89.00

read the description on the top. http://www.rackshack.net/english/bargain.asp

--- if you are goin cheap _ cheap but it will handle your site very very easy ---

--- $$$ little higher ---
http://www.rackshack.net/english/cobalt.asp
Our get a cobalt when they be come avaible.

I wold highly advise you to get a cobalt. ( the RAQ 4 mo. $ 99.00 )

Beacuse they are very easy to manage.
Very strong it the loads and traffic per sec.

I don't recomend you to get a celeron beacuse they come it a control panel that you don't need and the cobalt comes it a very very good control panel.

"Get the one it 256 ram *450MHz (k-62)* "

For $99 it's more than you need it will very fast things in that :P

-- Demo on the control panel --
http://www.sun.com/hardware/serverappliances/raq4/demo.html

what about colo

Well, there are a number of web host which supports Colo which is good, however you would probably be responsible to purchasing, setting up and sending the server to the datacenter. However, you could definitely determine your hardware configuration in accordance to your specification.

But at the current prices, some hosts charge about the same or higher for colo than for lease dedicated.

I use colo at dialtone and their is no way that dialtone can offer me the RAID and CPU config for the price that i pay for colo.

I feel that if you want RAID and Dual CPU, you should only consider colo cause dedicated is just too much when you get that hi-end systems.

guys, it's all about many apache (php) and heavy (my)sql usage here ...
so atleast i needed 512mb ram for a board with a user peak of 90ppl. wouldn't advise to get anything lower....
the cpu here isn't a big factor... but as said, ram is. so it's all about heavy resource usage on the hardware side, but not about heavy bandwidth usage.

best regards,

I run a similar vbulletin site with an average 50-80 off-peak and 100-120 at peak hours. The bandwidth is not the issue, even our old virtual server handled the 300gigs a month (we're picture site) easily enough before the user numbers went up. It's down to concurrent httpd connections, concurrent sql connections and software that *can* be resource hungry. (Dunno if yours is a picture site, but storing large binaries in the database, jeez, asking for trouble, that really screwed us for a while).

We ended up getting a dedicated for it, a 512mb 1G pentium III which handles it all fine, only touches above 1.00 load occasionally, although you really need to tweak my.cnf, php.ini and the mysql ini files as described in the vbulletin forum.

Hope this helps.