vbulleting hosting

[Snowballer]

I'm a windows developer, so i don't have much experience with unix boxes and vB resource usage.

Would pair hosting (shared) be enough to run a vB community? Say the traffic is like this forum (websitepublisher.net).

or would a dedicated server be my best bet?

[Chris]

Shared hosting is fine. This site is run a server that is shared (just shared among my sites, but still shared).

[KLB]

I use Pair networks for all of my web hosting. To run a vBulletin forum you would need an "Advanced" account or higher. If your forum gets too popular they may force you to a higher account for load purposes.

[Cutter]

I've got virtual hosting on a very active forum, plus photopost too, and it runs just fine. Granted, it is a new forum, but there are over 2,000 users and its averaging about 7000 posts a month.

[Bleys]

You might also check out ASmallOrange.com ... they have a number of people running largish vB forums on shared accounts. :)

[KLB]

Like I said, no worries with Pair. I run vBulletin on my account along with custom a CMS and other really busy database driven site. They use dedicated database servers so your website will be hosted on one server and the database will be on a different server. Also the do tape backups on everything which comes in real handy after major screwups.

[Fender963]

Im on shared hosting with Vbulletin and I easily get 450 new posts a day. My max concurrent users is also over 1000. I haven't had any problems yet.

Kyle

[Chris]

Server settings can help alot.

My most popular forum was slowing down (alot, load average like 15-30%, 30 seconds for a page load) with 3-500 people online at once. It was on a 3.06 p4 with HT, 2 gb of ram, and was fairly alone on that server, especially as far as MYSQL goes.

I posted a help request at vbulletin.com and they told me to do some things ( Ionly did about half so far... but they worked). I upgraded php & mysql versions (apparently both were bad versions). Then made some changed to http.conf and my.cnf (apache & mysql configuration files) and the change was instant and amazing. No slowdown at all now. Very quick.

[platinum]

I have a forum with about 12,000 users and about 800,000 posts - it was also running basically the same specs as Chris' server above (although slightly less ram, which definatly would have caused a bottleneck!). I spent ages tweaking mySQL to try and squease a bit more out of it, but it just wasn't happening. Generally have around 300 concurrent users, max was about ~800

Anyhow - we (as in me) recently (as in last night) upgraded to a dual xeon machine with 64bit linux, seems to run very nicely now. ;)

[Snowballer]

which forum is that chris?

kyle, you at pair? what account level?

[Chris]

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/

[Snowballer]

chris,

why haven't you cleaned up the session id's in the urls?

i've seen vbseo....any good?

[MaxS]

chris,

why haven't you cleaned up the session id's in the urls?

i've seen vbseo....any good?
There are no session id's in the URLs.

[cyanide]

I have several clients running some big boards in a shared hosting environment.

A few have several Gigs of database size and others are running with several hundred con-current users.

The key is to find a host that knows and understands mysql. And stay away from the budget hosts, because more often than not, they over-stuff their servers.
Also look for a host that use dual processors

[dc dalton]

I actually have 4 or 5 vBulletin sites running on my hosting company and we have never had an issue but as was mentioned above we run some higher grade machines: dual xeon 2.8 and 2gb RAM so these type sites scream along.

I have seen people try to run them on these cheapy hosting plans with horrible results, but when you look at those cheapy plans they are usually running freaking ancient CPUs and next to no RAM. I actually had a guy bragging to me the other day about his new server ... Celeron 800 with 256mb RAM, I honestly didn't have the heart to say anything!

[ramprage]

vBulletin is the best script for a large community, it keeps the load down pretty well. Things like UBB are just horrid and can bring even a Dual Xeon box down with only a few hundred users.

The guys at vbulletin.com forums are very good at helping you optimize your server. If you have some questions you can ask me. Once you start to get a few hundred users on the forums at the same time you should move to a dedicated.