Hi,
I'm planning on hosting a forum wich has about 300 users and would like to figure how much bandwidth, diskspace. If you are running a forum, I would appreciate if you could post some info about your forum so I can get an idea:

Software you use (phpBB, vBB, etc)
Since when your forum is open
Number of registred users
Numbers of views by month
Number of posts by month
Bandwidth by month
And Disk space it presently use

Thanks!

It all depends on the subject and popularity.

I know some very popular forums that had to go dedicated with in a year. Others are still running on a medium size shared account.

What's the subject matter?

We get asked this everyday and there's no easy answer. It all depends upon your user base. The more they use it, the more bandwidth.

Also simple stuff like how many replies per page you default to, how often you plan on doing "clean-up" of old posts, etc.

Also, if you are going dedicated keep in mind that the really important number is going to be the number of concurrent users. Keep in mind your 95th percentile usage is going to be three times your average bandwidth.

Most shared hosts don't price this way but most good dedicated servers will.

Greg

The forum has 350 regisred users, maybe 15-20 concurrent users at a time. I was planning to host it at venture online's 200mb/10gb bandwidth plan.

Do you think it would be ok ?

Should be OK. But again, it also depends on what visitors post. If they post some large files to share with others, it may be a problem.

For simple text forum, 10gb per month should be enough.

Yes, the forum is text only...

Thanks for you replies all.

Another question, does anyone got their forum shut down at Ventures Online from using too much cpu and ram ressources ?

I know that I'll stay within my bandwidth (I'll upgrade to the 20gb/month plan if needed) but I don't want my forum shutdown.

Thanks.

If you use more than your fair share (note: shared hosting), then every host (if they know what they are doing) will shut the site, or at least forum, down. This is somewhat relative, as hosts may have different limts for this sort of thing, and 10% of a RaQ3's 300 Mhz CPU is different than 10% of a dual PIII933's CPU (point being it might depend on the actual server you are on).