Greetings fellas,
I have 10 domains that I maintain on a "Unilimited Developer Unix" account with HostDepartment.com. I've been a customer of theirs for several years now. I made a website over the weekend for my gaming guild, templumonline. dot com.. and I migrated the SMF/TinyPortal forums from Ejeet to HostDepartment. The forums have performed horribly.. numerous timeouts... lost database connections... and horrendous load times 15 seconds to 60 seconds. I think anything under 10 seconds would have been tolerable... but its really lethargic on Host Department.

So, with that said, I'm looking for a quality, reliable host with enough of a throughput to allow PHPBB or SMF pages to load in under 10 seconds... the quicker the better, of course. I think with all the sites combined, the most bandwidth used in a month is 6 - 7GB.... I set the limit to 12GB at Host Department and we've never been notified of an overage... or for approaching the limit. The sites utilize about 5 MySQL servers... and I would prefer to have PHP5, since some of my custom PHP components were built to that standard.

Thanks for your time and I appreciate having this forum to get unbiased reviews.

Yikes 5 mysql servers, that must be costly, how big is the database size ?

Maybe he means 5 MySQL databases and not 5 MySQL servers. I don't even know how you can use only 6-7 GB with a site running 5 MySQL servers. :) Though I could be wrong, hopefully he'll be able to clarify. Either way, what is your budget?

5 MySQL databases I think you must mean...anyway, I think most providers have that as a minimum these days. There are many hosts here who can service your needs rather well. Agreed...60 seconds is ridiculous.

I would just do some research for some companies here. If you read around, there are many hosts that can offer you what you need and can help you more in detail if you contact them with your exact requirements.

I apologize... I'm currently only using 5 MySQL Databases... several of my sites requested to have forums... 4 run PhpBB while another runs SMF/Tinyportal.

As for the sites... they are mixes of Flash, PHP, XHTML, JavaScript... clients are a Paintball Park, Paintball Retail Store, Professional Paintball Team, Teamstore for the Pro Paintball team, Indoor Paintball Park, large Gaming guild, politician's campaign site, another gaming guild, and a personal site.

Typically,the sites are about as complex as this... this is one of the gaming guild sites... TemplumOnline (dot) com . I'm not allowed to post any links.

I'm currently on 2 of their "No Limit Developer Unix plans"... because each only allows 10 domains... so that alone runs me about $12 a month, if I could get something solid with fast response times... I would be willing to pay more. Before I was given the gaming site project, the previous website admin was using Ejeet Gaming guild hosting for the forums... and they were lightning fast in comparison to host department.

Many hosts could help you with these; just e-mail one on here that you see that could be interesting and they'll be glad to help you. :)

yeah i dont think your asking to much but then again its almost borderline dedicated.

i say that only because if you take a forum like this that uses tons of SQL queries per second because of the high traffic which also effects their bandwidth they are on a dedicated.

You said you run several forums and you said they are about as complex as this site. You SHOULD be ok but 5 forums on 1 account might actually cause some load..

I guess I was unclear again... I have 5 sites that use forums, none more complicated than www(.)TemplumOnline(.)com . The Forums for Templum Online have around 100 registered users.. with most online at one time, ever, was 16.. normally, the most I ever see online at one time is 6.

The other sites are smaller communities... local paintball players, parents looking to book a birthday party at the park, etc... probably 2-3 online at the same time browsing the forums. Overall, the 10 sites transfer about 6-7 GB of traffic per month.

As I type this... all of our sites are down again... along with HostDepartment.com's website.

What's your budget? how much space do you need in total for all your sites?

We currently have 1.4 GB stored on the server... and since April 15th, we've transfered 1.5GB of data.

I believe our storage needs wouldn't nearly be that high once I did some spring cleaning... I have some raw .PSD files and other large files that I hosted for our poster/banner printer to download. I think good portion of that 1.4GB would be taken out after the "cleanup"... probably more in the 0.7 - 1.0 GB range is more accurrate for website storage.

I would like PHP5, MySQL, and SMF/TinyPortal, as our current forums utilize those items.

I currently pay $21 a month.

$21 is quite high...Many other hosts here could do better for you. Your requirements are not that steep.

there are plenty of hosts available here that can support you on a more personal level if you do choose to move hosts.