vBulletin Looks Great....Benefits of switching from UBB!

[FW]

Although I am a novice at PHP and mySQL, I was able to get vB Lite up running on our server. Looks excellent, and I'm sure with a lot of editing to the templates I can get it to look like my current UBB. My question is really this, what will I gain by switching to VB? Here's my current situation:

My UBB has about 2,000 members and 70,000 posts on it, it is VERY active and we get about 600-700 new posts a day. I am getting killed on server space charges and bandwidth overages which is why I thought about switching to VB. It's not that the UBB is particularly slow, it's that it's a server hog, and of course the HTML pages take up a lot of space, and I a dying on bandwidth. So will I benefit from switching to VB, and how? Also, since I am new to VB, I just want to understand. The message and member info is stored in the mySQL database, so I probably will only be able to access via telnet? Is this true?

I am not looking for comments slamming InfoPop or the UBB, I am looking for honest answers and opinions, so that I can understand the benefits of switching to VB, if it will indeed help my current situation. I have been quite happy with my UBB, but if VB will make life easier and save me money in the long run, I am all for it.

Thanks in advance for any comments.


[Edited by FW on 06-21-2000 at 07:45 PM]

[Martin]

You will not see a significant decrease in bandwith. you will still be serving approximately the same number of images, etc as you are with UBB.

You will, however, see a HUGE decrease in storage space. My UBB took about 900Mb +/- when I transferred. On Vb it takes slightly over 200. That's with 250k+ posts and 3300+ members.

Also, if your host has PHP set up as a module, there will be a huge decrease in server load. If it's running as CGI, the load won't significantly change.

Yes, if you are virtually hosted, chances are you will only be able to access your DB via telnet, though I *think* you might still be able to do remote admin through PHPmyAdmin. I have my own server, so I can't swear to that one.

[Pilot]

pair.com allow remote ODBC access to MySQL databases, they
have a 400 MB per DAY inclusive bandwidth allowance on the $28 per month webmaster account. 120 MB disk space (and the SQL space appears to additional and free up to five dbs of 20 mb each).

[mmoncur]

Originally posted by Pilot
pair.com allow remote ODBC access to MySQL databases, they
have a 400 MB per DAY inclusive bandwidth allowance on the $28 per month webmaster account. 120 MB disk space (and the SQL space appears to additional and free up to five dbs of 20 mb each).

And vB does work on pair's servers. However, to avoid certain errors in their version of PHP, you have to install your own copy of PHP 3.016 or 4.0. You are thus running as a CGI application, although this is Pair's problem more than their users'. Hopefully an upgrade will improve this.

Also, phpmyadmin works if you install it on your Pair account, and since PHP is running on their network, you don't even have to enable remote ODBC access to do this.