I'm not sure if I should be posting these questions in this particular Forum or not, so forgive me if I shouldn't as this is my first post here.

I am currently hosted with A+Hosting which I really can't complain about up until a couple weeks ago. My overall site speed started slowing down and now at night, the entire site, especially the Forums dramatically slows down.

I currently run the vBulletin Forum software package as part of my site and the average number of guests and members online at one time...combined is about 25. I currently have 507 registered members and I'm anticipating further growth over the next couple of months.

I would like to move my site to HostRocket.com, but based upon talking with one of their sales reps today, 20 users online at one time is the max that they would allow before requesting that the site be moved from a virtual host to a dedicated server. Obviously, dedicated server pricing is much more expensive over virtual hosting and I'd like to hold off from going down that route until it's absolutely necessary.

Everyone here and at other sites seems to rave about HostRocket, but those of you that are running Forum software packages on HostRocket servers, are you all on dedicated servers with them or virtual? What are your average number of users online at any given time?

Can anyone suggest a reputable, well known hosting provider that would not have a problem with 20+ members/users online at once?

-Rob

With that many members you might want a dedicated server. Your clients will thank you for it, over the increased speed and load times of the pages. We just did a move of a client running a bulletin board from the shared to a nice dedicated box, and the amount of posts he got saying "Wow" this is fast, you would find suprising, he was getting around 7000 visitors a day.

Hi,
With that many users at once, yes, a dedicated box may be the way to go. You will have no problem finding a host willing to take your business, but your users will thank you for putting the site into it's own box.
BTW, how much transfer and storage is your site using. Do you have a budget to stick to with the move to dedicated?

Being stuck on a budget right now, I almost can't really afford to move to a dedicated server at this point. The cheapest dedicated servers I've found is at $150/month.

For $40.00/month, I have 450 mb of disk space (using 40 mb of that right now) and I'm seeing approximately 12 gb of data transfer/month.

I am trying to get the site to start generating an income, but it's going to take time and I need some kind of a temporary solution till I can afford a dedicated server. :(

You might want to check out
http://www.tera-byte.com

Huge allowance on bandwidth, and several plans to choose from.

A few board we host asked thier members for paypal donations to help fund and improve the board i.e. moving to a dedicated server. You might want to try that, one of them raised over $5000 in a little under 2 weeks.

If you`re really stuck you should go for http://uk2.net/ as an alternative to closing your site down. Just in case.

Originally posted by jayglate
...one of them raised over $5000 in a little under 2 weeks.

I'm in the wrong business. :)