how much bandwidth does a forum use? I know it's hard to guess...but I just need a basic idea.

Let's say a forum like this one, how much bandwidth does it use? 5GB a month? 10GB? More? Just a basic idea would be very nice!

THANKS!

Like this? If I'm not wrong it use near 80 GB per month.

This is totally dependant on the forum itself, how many posts, how many reads, etc.

Here is an example:

I have a customer that has a forum that serves a gaming community. It averages 30 simultaneous users peaking at 40-45. This forum uses approximately 40-50G/month

:uhh: oh no! lol that's a lot! we'll i don't think my forum will be this busy....

Okay thanks a lot! Can anyone else confirm or give me some more figures?

THANKS!!

I have a forum with 4 users and maybe a few hundred hits a month. It uses no more than 100MB of transfer.

Peter

Make sure you turn on GZIP compression within the message board configuration, or have mod_gzip installed on the server.

Thanks to message board pages being mostly full of text, the bandwidth savings from gzip compression is usually quite significant.

GZip does definitely help, as is the way your forum is configured. I run a forum which is heavy on images but is 1500 members. There are about 20 on at any given time and it uses 60GB per month.

It really depends on the heart of your forum :)

think about what a 36 thousand member forum with 300-500 users 24-7 posting, reading, looking, VBB Think about what it draws! :eek:

or picture 30 thousand, few hundred at any given time, using UBB! cant imagine the pipeline or hardware used to keep up with that sort of thing

it depends on how active your forum is going to be, I have a small phpBB which manages under 100mb monthly ..


if you want it big .. then it's big
it's all up to you (and the forum members)

Originally posted by DigiCrime
think about what a 36 thousand member forum with 300-500 users 24-7 posting, reading, looking, VBB Think about what it draws! :eek:

or picture 30 thousand, few hundred at any given time, using UBB! cant imagine the pipeline or hardware used to keep up with that sort of thing

I'm a mod over at the Maximum PC Magazine forum and we have 500-700 members and another ~500 guests visit daily. I'm not sure on total members but i'm guessing someplace in the 75,000+. luckly we use the free forum service at delphiforums.com so we don't worry about bandwidth or hardware :D

My forum which as maybe 2 people online at a time 5-10 at peak times uses a little over a gigabyte of bandwidth

I run a small forum with 130 members (about 30 of them quite active), and we have around 10 people on simultaneously. It uses ~ 3GB/month. It runs on YaBB SE from YaBB (http://www.yabb.info)

The problem is that every forum is different. Your individual pages may have more or fewer graphics (or heavier graphics), more or fewer users, etc. The best way to determine usage would be to run it for a bit and use the stats to predict future usage.

Oh goodness.

I'm very new to this thanks guys, so what are your tips on keeping the bandwidth down? use mod_gzip ? any others? where can i get mod_gzip ? thanks!