I plan on opening up my site very soon with phpBB forums. i know that the forums run off of your own server, so my main question is, for a popular forum, does it us up a lot of bandwith? Thank you! :)

Yes, popular forums can use a lot of bandwidth. Take into account, it needs to load all of the graphics, etc.

Most of all, most message boards are resource hogs.

My vBulletin board uses between 4 and 6GB per month, I have about 145 members, 4,000 threads, 40,000 posts, and my database is about 70MB. Nothing is on the main site at the moment, so it is really only the board using the bandwidth.

sheesh...i might need to upgrade....but its prob. gonna take some time to get up to the popularity i want it to.

Sarah Michelle Geller's Bulletin runs around 4 GB per day.
So just imagine. 120GB per month. But then again they are on a dedicated server.

Resource Hog? definately since it is extremely popular with millions and millions of hits a month.

Bandwdith? can fluctuate alot depending on her popularity.
It has been up to 210 GB per month before.

... I don't think that BB's are hogs. Let me explain why:

Let's take f.e. vB. If you (as on WHT) disable all the Avatar and Signature crap and empty "searchindex" and that useless "word" table and make good use of gzip then you can really minimize your bandwith. Also you can set LOAD LIMITS in the CP so the vB reacts when server is in high CPU load. I had a RaQ 4i once (K6II CPU, like old Pentium - 512 RAM - 15GB HDD) and it handled around 12 vB's with ~2-3.000 members each and a total of 400-500 MySQL connections.

The trick is to not use "pconnect" for example and tune the mysql conf to use a small timeout value for example and not use much memory for a MySQL call. Reason is that a message board is someone online for 90% idle (reading stuff) and then posting something. So perm connections are pretty useless a huge memory frame too as ther is never much data, I mean how much does a guy type in a post right?

Over 98% of BB's are not correctly managed or not at all! THAT is the problem!!!

Message boards are basically just a bunch of text, so unless your message board is very popular it should not consume any considerable amount of bandwidth at all.

For example in my experience a relatively busy message board which often sees 10-20 simultaneus users and many new posts a day might only need 1-2 GB of bandwidth a month, or less.

That said, if you have a lot of heavy downloads like custom avatars that would obviously use more bandwidth. The only concern about message boards is CPU usage, and with some of the newer boards such as vBulletin and phpBB even this is relatively well managed.

My anime message forum uses over 50GB - 75GB a month. With almost 400 members and 31,000 posts.

Originally posted by d3fuse
My anime message forum uses over 50GB - 75GB a month. With almost 400 members and 31,000 posts.

*bump* :D

ezRackSpace

Are you affiliated with Rackspace Managed Hosting?

I was just wondering since you seem to have something in common with them...

My forum (wbb 1.1) is just short of 20,000 posts and has been online for 5 months. It uses on average about 2.5gb a month, but then again i have avatars and sigs enabled. It only uses up about 30mb space, not including the 4.5mb database.


But it does take the server load high at peak times, I think i need to do some of what Sharefile suggested :D