Hi everyone,

I was wondering what sort of insight you can give me on the bandwidth requirements for a vBulletin. I don't know if I could ever create a board with as much traffic , but what would be typical transfer for something like WebHosting Talk? What might be a minimum connection speed to keep in mind for a board of this size?

Also, how much disk space does it utilize?

Thank you.

That completely depends on the number of visitors and posts.
Smaller boards will use anything below 1 GB but I have hosted medium-size boards with 20 GB traffic per month. Maybe you can ask Matt, the owner of this board what WHT actually uses (click on the About button above).

This board consumes approximately 300mb webspace and bandwidth is somewhere between 60gb-100gb I believe. The site runs on a Dual Pentium 750 server with 512mb RAM, this system supports WebHostingTalk fine, and can probably handle a lot more, probably two or three WebHostingTalks, however if the system specifications are increased there would still be an increase in performance of the forum.

The database is so large because we have not archive groups of threads, meaning that we have discussions on the forum that date back to early 2000. On top of that the Private Messaging system is like hosting Outlook Express for every one (granted the use is much smaller). If we only kept the past 6 month of thread (ie. regularly pruneing) and flushing Private Messages Inbox then we would have the database I would guess at less than 100mb.
Bandwidth could be dropped by using mod_gzip to probably 50% of what it is at present, however this creates an extra burden on the server and can cause additional problems.

WebHostingTalk (using VBulletin) was previously hosted on a 50mb webspace and 3gb bandwidth account, and at that time we were still pretty popular.

Start small :)

2 of my Vbulletin Sites:

Registered Members: 336
Forum Summary:818 threads | 6414 posts
3GB bandwidth last month

Registered Members: 2443
Forum Summary:1817 threads | 25600 posts
7.5GB bandwidth last month

hope this can help


Chan

vBulletin-france.com

> 525 members
> 1000 threads / 5500 posts

> about 2GB per month

jfiliss, creating a board from the ground requires lots of patience, because it`s hard to make it grow. I would suggest you think about a small shared account with mysql and php at first and see how it turns out.
+ if Matt had enabled gzip, it would probably just be around 20GB, so you can host it on a virtual until the hosting company decides that you`re using too much resources.

Another thing though, if you decide to hack your board a lot then you might need permissions and modules you can`t get on a virtual account.

take a read of the reply i posted here about the exact same question - http://www.sitepointforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=37165 :)

9000 Members
300181 posts (deleting everything older than 90days)
39000 threads (deleting everything older than 90days)

100 GB traffic monthly

Registered Members: 936
Total Threads: 2866| Total Posts: 12866

So far this month: 26Gb of bandwidth

and growing.

:)

Two popular VB forums hosted on my server:

First:
Registered member: 8189
Total Thread: 22863
Total posts: 112505
users online (max): 350-400
mysql db size: around 250MB
data transfer per month: webalizer (25-30GB), bandmin (60-75GB) -> hence, I am not sure which one is correct

Second:
Registered member: 2489
Total Thread: 3315
Total posts: 22508
users online (max): 50-75
mysql db size: around 40MB
data transfer per month: webalizer (~10GB), bandmin (~15-20GB) -> again, I am not sure which one is correct

PS: mod_gzip is enabled, so data transfer has been reduced by factor of around 2.

cheers,
:beer:

my one and only vB forum stats


Registered member: 3,670
Total Thread: 27,640
Total posts: 433,587
Total Thread views: 3,649,421
users online (max): 250-586
mysql db size: around 515MB
data transfer per month: with mod_gzip enabled: 1 - 3GB/day

about 1,500 - 2,200 new posts/day :D

eva2000 ... Hm ... that's very nice ... fewer members but higher posts ... must be very active members on the board you have :) what is the server specs/server load for this forum? Is the server yours? BTW, I have pm-ed you asking for your advice on my server ... :)

cheers,
:beer: