Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Forum Sizing

[grap]

Can anyone give me figures on running a forum of this size please i.e. WHT sized. I know this is difficult to be accurate.

I am setting up a large forum with possibly 800 posts a day and want to know what size hosting plan to get (please try to give me ana assessment of figures not just advice to get a dedicated server.). Will 10GB disc and 100GB bandwidth a month be sufficient?

Kind Regards

[Loon]

It's really very very hard to say.

Firstly, WHT doesn't just use a "hosting plan" but a cluster of servers, i think 4 in total though there's a couple of other boards on there also.

The resources you need would depend on alot of things, what type of software you're going to run, whether you're just going to run an "out of the box" copy or something with aload of mods and hacks adding extra queries.

I don't think anybody could say you'll use x amount the best thing is just to ensure that you are hosted somewhere that will allow you to easily upgrade if it's needed.

If this is a new forum though which it sounds like, not wanting to burst your bubble but i wouldn't jump in for a huge account or especially a server from day one, everybody always "expects" their forum to get hundreds of posts a day and be huge, but probally less than 1% of them ever do.

If you start small you can always upgrade, but if you throw aload of money away at the start and find it wasn't needed, you can't ask for that money back.

[Outofmymindy]

Also, if you're looking to have a large number of users online at one time, you need to make sure you're not going to be hogging server resources on a shared host with the forum software.

[R.Harrison]

I think that that plan would be significant enough. Maybe you want to have a smaller plan then upgrade then you have to tho.

[CrazyTech]

I don't think it'd be strong enough IMHO. If you're planning to get that much activity that soon, I'd go ahead and have the site on its own dedicated machine. It's impossible to give you an 'assessment of figures' because they're are too many variables, but resources will get demanding once the place starts to get active. Depending what else is on the machine, things may very well get hairy. Transfer is not so much the issue at this point as it simply is the resources for the machine. I'd be especially concerned if this was in a shared environment. It might be a little safer on your own server, but still too close for me.

[websterworld]

CrazyTech? good to see you around again

I agree, its really impossible to tell.
Here's a thinker... which one is less of a resource hogg: VBB, IPV, phpBB2?

I think VBB is the most efficent, I really don't remember, things might have changed.

do some research and go with the lightest one to save on bandwith.


Q': what makes you so sure that the forum is going to be so active so fast?

[Rahde]

i am a mod at a forum (http://www.zerowarmth.com/shinhwa_sarang) right now we get about 800-900 posts a day, we have gotten close to 2000 a day in previous months. average is about 1200 a day. at peak times we have around 50-60 users on.

at our peak days, (~2000 posts) we have used about 2.2 gigabytes of bandwidth a day.

this has been a slow month with 800-1000 posts daily, so far we haved 40 gigabytes of bandwidth.

with >100k posts in the db, the sql size is 81mb