Hosting costs?

[Chruser]

How much would it cost to host something with the magnitude of hardforums.com for instance? I'm just trying to figure out what the best solution would be, incase something like that would accidentally happen.

[eva2000]

Originally posted by Chruser
How much would it cost to host something with the magnitude of hardforums.com for instance? I'm just trying to figure out what the best solution would be, incase something like that would accidentally happen. hardforums probably uses 2 dual server setups at least - 1 dual cpu web server + 1 dual cpu database server with 1 - 4gb ram each

and probably generates 100 - 300+ gb/month

depending on which hosts you go with and level of technical support you want it can cost anywhere between US$1500 - 4000/month rental for such a setup with 2 dual cpu servers

if you buy the servers and colocate then the price would be different

[Chruser]

Sounds like alot of bandwidth to me.
Speaking of bandwidth, how effective could you possibly "compress" the data, assuming you don't ruin the "quality" too much. I heard something about GZIP, but I never managed to investigate it.

[eva2000]

vB has inbuilt gzip function to compress php pages within vB and to be able to use it you need to have PHP compiled with zlib support and zlib to be installed

vB can set the level of gzip compression and recommended and optimal setting is 1

or you can use mod_gzip installed on your server (dedicated owners) which can compress all configured .php, .html, shtml, .pl, cgi etc pages server wide, not just php within vB as with the above

these can reduce page size by 5 - 90% but on average monthly bandwidth reducation is around 25 - 36% from my experience and reports from others

[ubbuser]

Hi eve2000 the specs for hardforum are impressive. I glanced at their site 650 concurrent users, 950 max.

However how do they recoup their costs of hosting such an expensive setup? :confused: