Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : FORUM bandwidth / space: what is yours using?

[dwergs]

I'm trying to estimate how much monthly gb bandwidth and how many megabytes a message board with about 2000 registered members will generate.

I used to have one of that size, but I didn't have access to the server logs back then.

The stats from PhpBB2 (gzip_mod enabled btw) showed an average of 300-350 messages posted daily. There were usually between 6 and 20 members 'browsing the forum'.

Please share your thoughts and try to estimate a number of gigabytes bandwidth and megabytes diskspace with me. If you run a forum yourself, I might be able to draw conclusions from the size of your memberbase, the number of daily messages, diskspace and the monthly bandwidth.

[JeremyV]

I have a forum with 3300 members, and over 100,000 posts. It has been active for under a year. The database itself is around 70mb, and it usually does around 7-12 gigs of bandwidth a month. This is phpBB.

I was using vB, but that used a bit more bandwidth and server resources generally speaking.

I also run another site, it has less members (800) but is way more active. At times over 500 message a day. This one uses around 10 gigs a month and the database is around 50mb with 80,000 posts. This forum is UBB.Threads. And even being as busy as it is and having more concurrent users, the server load is much lower.

The only problem is if you do end up having a lot of users online at the same time, you may want to look into a dedicated server as eventually you will be using too many mysql connections and/or system resources.

Hope that helps

[Prince]

are you going to allow attachmets and avatars?

if so how large? and are you going to have attachments show as links, or the actual image?

how much graphics will be used on your forum pages?

these things will make the biggest difference with bandwidth and disk space.

[secludo]

I'm running a board (vBulletin) and get about 5GB transfer per month -- as opposed to UBB which was giving me 10-15GB. I have about 130 members -- we had 160, I removed everyone with 0 posts and shut off registration for a few months, however (registration has re-opened about a week ago, and we get a few new registrations each day). Currently we have 6,052 threads and 60,281 posts -- for the month of October (the 1st to the 14th) I've averaged about 250 new posts per day. My board database is 184MB.

[ffeingol]

dwergs,

It's really hard to estimate the transfer requirements for a board. A lot is dependant on the actual layout of your board (i.e. lots of graphics, little graphics etc.) and the nature of the posts. If you get into long discussions on the forum it will take more transfer than one with lots of short threads.

Frank

[Sainthax]

PHPBB2 with 4 themes and 50% of all users have 8k avatars
it uses less than a gig a month

Number of posts: 9380
Posts per day: 29.63
Number of topics: 974
Topics per day: 3.08
Number of users: 274
Avatar directory size: 117.15 KB
Database size: 8.58 MB
Gzip compression: ON

[dwergs]

I won't allow uploading (attachments nor avatars), simply because everybody can get free hosting of a jpg or gif file somewhere (I will suggest some hosts).

I expect most individual messages to be not longer than 2 or 3 sentences.

I'll probably use Invision Board and very basic theme(s).

I always thought I'd be needing a minimum of 50 gigs transfer for a forum of this size. But now I guess 25 gigs (just to be sure) will satisfy?

[Prince]

if you do not allow attachments, then your database should stay pretty small.

My vB has over 185,000 posts and 3,000+ members.

Here are my DB stats:

Database Data Usage:
444.93 MB

Database Index Usage:
53.33 MB

Attachment Usage:
337.25 MB

Custom Avatar Usage:
0.70 MB

as you can see attachments take up a huge amount of space.

[IQStudio]

JeremyV, what are the web addresses of your boards?
PM me if your not allowed to post it. Thanks

[phpcoder]

http://www.ironmagazineforums.com/