Hello everybody,

I am probably about to sign up for JaguarPC hosting.... but I was wondering thtough all your experiences, what is the best web host for running a UBB.... I have one site up on Host Rocket.... but the ubb doesnt run that well on thier servers, it is rather slow, and when multiple people are logged in many users just get a empty white screen instead of the message board.

So should I just go for JaguarPC or are there any other suggestions. I would just prefer host under $20 a month (paying monthly, not every 3 months) and also have at least 200mb of space to use.

THANKS
Brady

UBB won't run well on nearly any server, because it's so CPU intensive (thus it affects other sites on the same server as well). You're gonna get a lot of forum members here lobbying you to switch over to vBulletin (http://www.vbulletin.com).

Unless you get some deal with unlimited bandwidth, also watch out for Fusetalk :)

Example:
Visit http://forums.anandtech.com/categories.cfm?catid=40

And do a "view source". Then do a Select All.

The web pages generated by Fusetalk have a MASSIVE amount of white space in them... I'm just guessing, but I think 40% of the page is just junk (that is just a waste of bandwidth).

How can anyone host that program when people refresh forum pages all day?

Originally posted by StephenRS
Unless you get some deal with unlimited bandwidth, also watch out for Fusetalk :)

Example:
Visit http://forums.anandtech.com/categories.cfm?catid=40

And do a "view source". Then do a Select All.

The web pages generated by Fusetalk have a MASSIVE amount of white space in them... I'm just guessing, but I think 40% of the page is just junk (that is just a waste of bandwidth).

How can anyone host that program when people refresh forum pages all day?

As BC said, it's very CPU intensive, which may have little to no bearing on bandwidth. Webhostingtalk.com gets a good amount of accesses all day and they don't move that much bandwidth. However, if they ran the UBB board, they'd still only move the same amount of bandwidth (or less, since the pages would be slower and therefore produce less accesses and data transfer throughout the day), but the system would be crippled under such CPU loads. Most chat rooms and web boards aren't so much an issue for web hosts in terms of bandwidth, as they are in regard to how much resources on the actual system it takes in terms of RAM and/or CPU. That is what BC meant, I believe, not anything about bandwidth.

Tim_Greer: I was just giving an FYI on _FUSETALK_, not UBB.

They were talking how UBB was a CPU pig, I was making a point that the other thing to watch for is bandwidth.... using a 3rd product (Fusetalk) to demonstrate that.

Forums invite frequent refresh...

vBulletin seems to have both (CPU and bandwidth) under control!

Originally posted by StephenRS
Tim_Greer: I was just giving an FYI on _FUSETALK_, not UBB.

They were talking how UBB was a CPU pig, I was making a point that the other thing to watch for is bandwidth.... using a 3rd product (Fusetalk) to demonstrate that.

Forums invite frequent refresh...

vBulletin seems to have both (CPU and bandwidth) under control!

I see... Well, it looks to me, that a simple editing of one line and then maybe a few lines on a template to remove the whitespace would solve that problem. Are you aware of any other issues with that board?

I know that both Anandtech.com and Fatwallet.com use it and it seems to perform very well in terms of CPU/database... those sites get extremely high hit rates during peak times. Especially Anandtech... and Anandtech isn't the type of place that strikes me as afraid to try alternatives... and they have stuck with it.
http://www.e-zonemedia.com/fusetalk/success.cfm even lists them as a reference customer.

I personally haven't installed it or anything... but I've been on those two forums for 9 months. Users like it, seems to be very fast. I think they may both be running it on Win2K... but they support Linux and Solaris.

But I once went to save a copy of a thread with View Source and did notice the terrible waste of bandwidth (it is even on the message view screens).

I can't understand WHY the authors (Fusetalk) wouldn't clean it up. I know for a fact that on those forms (Anand and FW) that people just sit there and refresh to see new topics. 140K of data to send 20K of text :)!

Even on Fusetalk's own support forums I do a view source... http://www.e-zonemedia.com/forum/categories.cfm?catid=47
and see the same waste.

((Irony is that Anandtech quotes say the selected fusetalk because they didn't want to pay $10,000 for the higher-end products -- but I bet they pay that in bandwidth ever 3 months!))

Well, I hope u guys are right about the vbulletin thing.... I just bought a liscense for one to use on my site......

Brady

one site that I have seen use vBulletin and HAS PROBLEMS...

http://forums.2cpu.com/ -- I don't have any idea what it is running on, but it is very slow (over weeks that I have used the site)... and today I got database timeout errors.

However, the site we are on right now (WebHostingTalk) runs perfect... so I just think some type of configuration problem on 2cpu.com (I notice they are on older version 1.1.5).

Originally posted by StephenRS
...
However, the site we are on right now (WebHostingTalk) runs perfect... so I just think some type of configuration problem on 2cpu.com (I notice they are on older version 1.1.5).
WebHostingTalk is running on a dedicated server that has only one other site running on it... I don't how much that helps it, but it sure doesn't hurt. :)

you can see my vBulletin board at http://www.consoleboards.com

I am currently redesigning right now.......

but it seems to be running good so far.... I only have 9 member so far, but more will come soon. The site has been shut down for a long while, I use to have it running on a UltraBoard, but then it started deleting peoples posts a lot........ so I just gave up for a while and shut down... .......

Good luck, keep us informed on how it goes.

Hey, I am hosted on JaguarPC. Look links in my signature. One of my site (upper one) has Vb running. So far, it has been a month since I began to run Vb.

klisis, Ive already been to your site a few times before you even posted here... nice site.

I saw it on the jaguarpc forums... i think

Brady

I saw in several posts the argument that Fusetalk uses too much bandwidth because it has excessive whitespace in the HTML source it produces.

I'm a little surprised to hear this. Just because there is a lot of whitespace doesn't mean it takes up too much additional bandwidth. For instance, I can have hundreds of lines of whitespace in my source and take up only a few hundred bytes. 1 CR character is only 1 byte. So unless they are using a couple of hundred space characters instead of 1 CR character for line feeds to produce their source, then I seriously doubt that they are causing a bandwidth problem with whitespace.

Brian

Their point is that it all adds up, especially with the excessive refreshes that occours on all forums.

A good alternative to UBB I've found is Ikonboard. Version 3, which is due shortly, should match vBoard's speed.

Originally posted by greatgraddage
Their point is that it all adds up, especially with the excessive refreshes that occours on all forums.

Yes, it does. So you would propose then that no whitespace be used at all? Whitespace is what makes the source human readible. Even though the vast majority of the time only a browser has to read this stuff, it is extremely valuable to write or dynamically produce code that is easily readible. Anyone who has written source code in any language should understand this concept.

Unless the wasted whitespace produced by the script is more than 5% of the size of the page, then you won't be able to notice any difference at all on any but the largest pages (100's of KB in size.)

Also realize that for there to be 5% of the size of the page or more in wasted whitespace, there would need to be a ton of extra tabs, spaces and CR's.

I would be very surprised if that was in fact the case.

Brian

All you have to do is put the white space in your SERVER-side code! Don't put it in the output HTML.

This bandwidth waste is SO LARGE - it adds up, and on Fusetalk, it is WAY WASTE. 80% of the page is WASTE. That is gigabytes upon gigabytes of bandwidth a month! Hundreds, if not THOUSANDS, of dollers PER MONTH in hosting for a site like Anandtech.com

Other solutions
=================

Run your code through some simple scripts to strip out the while space for your production-server runs. Do this automatically anytime you move code from dev to production.

No human needs to "view source". People on 28.8 modems surely can not download 180K of text to read what is 5 pages on paper! That is just plain nuts.

This vBulletin forum is a good compromise. some waste, but nothing NEAR what Fusetalk has. It is absolutely absurd. Obviously designed and purchased by people who have no clue on "total cost of owership" for a web site.

And the nutty thing is that I bet the problem could be fixed in 4 or 5 hours with the solution I proposed. It is only 3 or 4 web pages that make up the most frequently ones used in a forum package.

What about compressing BBfiles?

Look at this thread at Ikonboard forums,here (http://forums.ikonboard.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=11;t=254).

Any comments is it possible to use with Perl scripts like Ikonboard and UBB? Is it a feature in some other boards, like vBulletin?