Forum resources

[vegas]

Hello can anybody that has had a successfull forum tell me how much disc it sucks in 2 or three years as well as memory and bandwidth?

[Eased]

This depends on the site of the forum. At first it will use very little.

[othellotech]

Completely dependant on the forum softwsre, the type of forum, the number of visitors, the number of threads, the number of concurrent users, whether you allow it to be searched/indexed by SE's etc

Taking 3 extreme's:

* One of the general forum's we host requires multiple load balanced front-end servers, and dedicated DB servers and ~30Mb/s of transit.
* One of the car-club forums we provide services for used to need a separate web-server and db server, but thats all been merged onto one dual hex-core, 96gb or ram and 12 drives in R10 and seems to perform just fine.
* One of the medical forums we host runs perfectly on a 2GB RAM VPS

YMMV

[vegas]

In other words you mean that succesfull forums surely will need a dedicated server

thank u

[SHC_techsvcs]

Othellotech is correct, there are so many different factors. It's almost impossible to say. Back just a few years ago, it was common to run a server with 4gigs of ram and a mid line CPU and host a bunch of phpBB forums who just wanted to talk about games, guns, you name it. Now with WP blogs, graphic intensive CMS programs all tied in, you can really suck up the power and load up a DB really quick.

However, I tell people unless you really know your audience, or are moving an existing forum that runs a lot of traffic, start small even if only on a shared hosting platform, till you build your traffic and subscriber base up. Then get something better because it is no big deal to upgrade or move into a larger / dedicated server.

Plus it's better on the wallet also.

[vegas]

You mean blogs made with word press?,are they more compleate?

Most forums live out of advertising so its always a jeopardy now a days ,I really wouldnt do never a Forum because I dont have the time to do so and if Id do would never use phpbb since nobody takes serious those forums,however even if people gets to like or not ur forum it needs biz investment however,so If I ever did that would be done the right way with a cheap server of 4t bandwidth and at least 3 gigas of memory and in case people dont fancy my forum I would sell vbulletin to somebody and use my server for other thing however I fell forums are true vampires in time and money related issues,but if you have got a great concept with a great domain and you happen to be good on that niche there good probabilities it could be a great success,and if you dont mind pamper it :-)

[IkY0294]

not only do people use forum scripts to just make forums but they make sites to.. forexample gaming tournament website uses vbulletin and they just code up a whole bunch of addons . there are many sites today that use the core script of a forum software and expand a lot on it,

also any forum with a lot of users and concurrent users will need a server , even a gallery with comments.

phpbb is a good script if you make your own template you can cover all that up and transform the site make it look like you dont have phpbb i've done it before for a client of mine

[vegas]

Ive seen a vbulletin that also charges per post ,this is awesome like classifieds,is this what you mean?,or vbulletin has that on built default capacity?