Everytime i'm looking for a hosting company, i would ask them if they have any HARD limit on user_connections set on their server. Some would reply me YES, WE DO and the limit is 50 or etc while some says NO, we DONT.

How can i find out what is the HIGHEST NO of user_connections my website/VBulletin has ever used? Without a figure, i cant really go and signed up for a host that says YES, WE DO.

Another thing i need to clarify is, the user_connections is actually the HTTP server taking the contents from MySQL server OR my visitor taking the contents from MySQL server thru HTTP server?

Most of my visitors are on 5.6k modem and i was wondering would this make the connection longer in the sense that a cable user might only utilise the connection for 0.5 seconds while 5.6k modem will take 3 secs.

Thank you.

Determine how many connections are currently being used on the server:

show status;

How many connections will your application consume? Depends on the load your application presents. If you are getting 100's of requests a second, then you are going to run into trouble at most hosts I suspect.

Newer versions of MySQL allow user-level restrictions of connections too.

The maximum number a server can support is dependent on the server configuration and operating system, and what is being done on the connections. It could be as high as many hundreds, or as low as 30-50 if the server is misconfigured.

I don't think the speed of connection of your users will impact things in any way.