Web Space etc

[nick69]

Can anyone tell me how much Web Space and Bandwidth id need for a simple forum??

Its not going to be a general chat forum more an Info Based forum. 123Reg do a web hosting package with 100MB and 1500MB for just under £40 a year plus the domain name would put it up to £40.

Any one got any input?

[55starchief]

The hosting for this forum is with go daddy

[art b]

[EDGE]

forum use a LOT of processing power more than anything else as the database's can get massive

[nick69]

So how much do you think?

[HardRockCamaro]

It completely depends how busy your forum is.

There are 3 factors to consider:

1) Database size
This will grow the more posts and users there are.  Some forums delete posts older than a certain date to keep this in control.
100MB isn't a lot but is plenty to get going.  Bear in mind the potential hassle and technical difficulty in moving to another provider in future if your needs grow.

2) Bandwidth
This will grow depending on how many visits your forum gets.  If each "page" viewed consumes around 50KB (you don't need to count images hosted elsewhere) then 1000MB (1GB) of bandwidth per month will handle 20,000 page views per month.  That's around 650 per day.

3) Processing power
The scripts that power a forum (ie pull the posts out of the database and display them etc) put quite a strain on a server.  This means that your website will use more of the servers resources than the other websites sharing the same server which means the hosting company may force you to upgrade to a more expensive package on a less loaded server or instead they may throttle your forum so that it loads slower and if there is more traffic to your site than the throttled forum can deal with pages won't even load, they'll time out.


A busy site will eventually need its own server which can be expensive (ie £100 per month as an example) and really busy forums can require several servers to run them which can easily cost £1,000 per month.

Obviously not something you need to worry about now but it is worth bearing in mind for the future if your site does take off.

For now space with GoDaddy (or whoever) would be fine.

[nick69]

Ill use a free one to start then and see if it takes off.

Cheers guys.

[ianjpage]

wot hardrock said!!

[nick69]

Cheers Ian

[55starchief]

If your looking for a lite forum then minibb is the one t go for, this is what we use here and is free

[nick69]

Im in the process of setting one up using full phpBB.

Just gonna tweak it then get it going. At weekend.

[ianjpage]

[art b]

we will be there for you nick..........