I have a little hosting issue I need assistance with...

I run a site (going on 5 years now), which I need to find a home for. All hosting was handled by the Network which who we were affiliated with. Now we have to go on our own.

The site ( http://www.gaming-age.com ), isn't terribly large by some of today's standards, and doesn't serve up anything besides HTML & scripts, screens and some movies, so that's not the problem.

Our main concern is the forum ( boards.gaming-age.com ), which is currently also hosted by the network we are affiliated with. It does 2000+ posts/day (is that really a lot?), with many reads as well. When using the PERL based UBB board, about a year ago we used to slow down the server to a crawl.

Now, what in the world do I need, to host the site (which does about 1.5 million views/month) and the boards (another 1 million+/month).

I was thinking about something like Dedicated Server Package #1 (with both bumped up to 256 Megs RAM) at both http://hostrocket.com/v2/dedicated.html and http://www.venturesonline.com/Dedicated_Servers/dedicated_servers.html

Would that be enough? Does anyone have experience with this?

We can only afford what the site bring in by ads and other revenue streams, which after this month, may not be a whole lot more than these packages cost. I run the site as a hobby, and hate to see 5 years of work/history go down the tubes.

Was think of a 850 mHz+, 128-256 megs RAM, Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP solution (with VBulletin possibly).
Actually, http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ is more or less how I'd like our forum performance to be. Do we know the system stats for the server?

Thanks for all your help!

--Jim

Hi,
http://www.wizardshosting.com hosts this board. I believe it is running on a Dual Pentium III, 512mb of ram and SCSI drives. Carlos, the owner of Wizards, may want to correct me here.

Good Luck with your project!

Well, first off, I definitely recommend you switch to vBulletin. It's a great software package. Anyway, I'd say what you're looking at will work, though I'd say you go with 512 MBs of RAM, since the site uses many scripts (like the forums).

Ok, well thanks for the help so far guys.
I seem to be finding some type of direction now :)

Any more details would definitely be a big help.
We are definitely going with the Linux/Apache/MYSQL combo and either VBulletin or WWWTHreads PHP version, as forum software.

--Jim

Hi,
You might also want to check out a free mysql/php bulletin board at http://www.phpbb.com. Their support forum is at http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB We use it for our Support Forum. It's not as fancy or customizable as vBulletin, but then again, it free :)

Just a thought :)

Hi Jim

You are SEMI correct :)

This board used to be in "wizard" (A Dual PIII 600 with 512Mb of RAM), but now it is on a more secluted server that only hosts this board and our main site.. and that is a PIII 933 with 512MB of Ram

Quite a nice machine I must say :)

The more ram the better.....

Carlos, I wish my home machine was even 1/5th that.....