Small forum bandwidth

[JohnRobHolmes]

I was wondering what a small forum would run for monthly transfer and storage, in other words how much mem and transfer does a smaller VB forum need? I know some of you fellas have your own local forum, I need a place to start for hosting and don't want to go under. I can always grow with the forum.

[Red Rockcrawler]

I'm with go dedicate. I run thier yabb forum right now it is free. my package is $60.00.

[Unholy]

Ask Cloak what he can do... he has some connection to a hosting company.

Also, I can throw $40 or $50 at you to help cover it.

[_BEN_]

I was researching this a while back (I attempted to buy an existing forum) and the solution that I found was going the Virtual Private Server route. On the vbulletin community forum it is discussed quite a bit.

Another thing you may want to consider is how long term will this project be and do you want to have to transfer your site when it out grows its home?

One of the things I learned from my research is that if it is too good to be true it probably is. There are allot of hosts out there that are offering awsome plans but are not reliable.

Another option for a forum would be to go with www.zeroforum.com .
www.vwvortex.com and www.honda-tech.com are two massive forums that are based on zeroforum.

[badger]

1. Buy the domain name yourself from Godaddy.com. Most hosting providers offer free domain names but the catch with that is they retain technical ownership of the domain name and if/when you want to move your web site to another hosting provider you cannot easily do it without having technical ownership and will not be able to change the DNS information for your domain name.

2. Research the hosting provider for quality of service (I finally replied to your PM and mentioned this).

3. You want to purchase a hosting plan that is (most importantly) running Linux/Unix, if the server is Linux it should be running the following by default. Apache, PHP, and MySQL. You will need a hosting plan that gives you at least 2 or 3 MySQL databases if not more.

4. Most hosting providers will let you upgrade your plan at anytime. That means you can start out with a smaller plan and monitor your bandwidth and disk space usage and upgrade the plan down the road when you need more resources.

5. Most hosting providers over sell there hosting services expecting most of their users not to use all of the resources given to them. And some of the bad ones load up their shared servers/services so much that the quality of services is so poor that you cannot even get your maximum monthly data transfer (bandwidth).

6. Read the TOS (Terms of Service) throughly for limitations on the account you want to purchase. Some hosting providers put limitations on how many database connections at a time per account can use. If the number of connections is to low you can have database connect errors even on a relatively small forum.

Check out VB's forum for more recommendations.

[JohnRobHolmes]

Sweet, thanks for the input guys. This definitely helps narrow the search. I am looking for this to be a long term thing.

[FrankyRizzo]

Originally Posted by JohnRobHolmes

Sweet, thanks for the input guys. This definitely helps narrow the search. I am looking for this to be a long term thing.

Very informative. Thanks Badger