Hi, let me tell you a little about my site and the story.

I currently help run a sports website, BaylorFans.com. Its on a virtual server right now at Communitech.net. We are looking into a dedicated server. Communitech has been great, but the problem that they were having with our site was our BBS was using too much cpu usage. We run with the UBB right now. On a good day during the sports season we will have anywhere from 60-90 people on the BBS at a time. That was what was killing us, because we had all of these hack like whose online and so fourth.

Our site info. We currently have 400 MB taken up on the virtual server. We usually transfer anywhere from 15GB-25GB of bandwidth a month. We think that we might be able to compress that bandwidth a bit if we go with V-Bullitin. We have heard rumors that V-Bullitin has something called GZip that compresses bandwidth on the BBS by 80%. Our site currently takes anywhere from 500K-600K impressions a month.

Basically we think we are getting to big and may need a dedicated server. We are not a rich site, because we get our money from banner ads. The banner world has not been kind lately. Our site did pretty well on a virtual server and still really does at communitech. We are the typ of site that could go a little longer on a virtual server or get on a dedicated

I really need to know your prizes and what you offer with a dedicated server. My worry is first off, memory on a dedicated server? How much should we get for a site our size? Off course bandwidth is an issue with dedicated servers. How much do you allow and what do you charge if we go over? How hard is a dedicated server to get setup for us? Do we set it all up by ourselves? We have actually had other offers about sharing a dedicated server which doesn't sound too bad. They were offering the space to us for $50 and we pay for any bandwidth we go over after 15GB. We need a good deal, because we are not rich

Also, we will have to have MySql and PHP on the server? Do we get that if we go with you guys? Also, how much downtime will this server have?

I would appreciate any kind of help right now. Thank you for taking time to read this!

hey,
welcome to the board.. the first thing you should do is move to Vbulletin... once your done with the move, you may not need a dedicated server :)

kunal

Hm, maybe, but with 60-90 users online at a time and hacks like "who's online" and so on...

First off thanks for replying! Also, thanks for having a site like this to help! I am not so lost thanks to reading the BBS!

We are going to go with VB. The problem is I heard some people that had the UBB that switched to VB also ended up getting kicked off of their virtual server:( I have a feeling that my site would also.

This would be my first dedicated server. Is it hard to maintain? I know you don't have much help from the company that you get it with after a month or so? I have to update the software and install all of it? Is that hard and does it cost a lot to keep the software updated? Say for instance, updating MySql and so fourth.

I am just curious if this RQ4 with 256MB RAM would be ok for my site. I just want it to be able to run fast for my customers.

As far as I know vBulletin doesn't use more resources than UBB, maybe less.
Regarding your other concern: you should have some knowledge of Linux, of course there are control panels which ease your live a bit, but there will be situations where you need to know what you do on the command prompt.
If you don't have this knowledge or don't want to learn it (and learning by doing can sometimes be very frustrating with a dedicated box) I recommend you either get a managed server (=dedicated where the host does all the work, rather expensive) or you search for a host which is willing to negotiate a bigger package for you.

I don't think it helps if you switch to VB, your website is too big for CT (I wonder why you are still there).
I'm using CT too and I'm sure you will miss the nice control panel, I don't think any of the panels installed on a dedicated server is so easy like CTs.
Walter's suggestion is very correct. A friend of mine switched to a cheap dedicated server with his VB and two weeks later he came back ask my for managed webspace on my server.
If you are not familar with administrating a remote server you will need a lot of time and money (extended support) to hold your server running.

- domi