RonH.
Thu 19th Jun '03, 5:55pm
Maybe someone here with some experience in this area can possibly answer a question I have regarding the size and capacity needs of a potential message forum I'm going to set up. (I'm already a licensed OWNER of vBulletin as of last week). I'm currently looking at literally dozens of hosting sites and have sent out some emails inquiring about their services and to be frank, I'm not really sure just what size of a plan I'm really looking for after all in regards to storage space and bandwidth requirements. I'm trying to keep my costs at or below $30 a month if this bit of info is needed. I COULD go more but would prefer not to naturally.
Okay, this would be a NEW forum and I'll need to build it from scratch (ver 3.0.0 I hope / presume). I have quite a few people awaiting the opening of it already and it will grow pretty quickly once word is spread within the community it will be designed to serve I feel. But regardless, I'll proceed here.
Allow me propose a potential message forum parameters and see what some of you think or suggest:
My forum would have somewhere between 1000 and 2000 members within a year or less (estimated);
Out of these maybe 35 to 70 may be online at the same time on average (estimated);
During times of major news events (example: the war in Iraq) the usage could/would jump by a factor of between 2 and 5 (or possibly even more) I'd suspect (based on several years of observation of other similar sites I'm currently a part of);
The forum would primarily have text posts with some images as it would involve political discussion and debates along with reposted news articles intended for discussion purposes. Naturally the posts would need to be archived for future retrieval and threading requiring a database (if that makes sense and is the correct terminology);
Hotlinking wouldn't be permitted due to the bandwidth considerations if determined to be a reasonable approach and bandwidth costs became a real $$ issue for me. (I admit to inexperience in this regard but have done some reading on the subject);
I'd like enough storage space for a complete backup in the event of a major vBulletin upgrade or some similar event requiring a large enough space requirement for that;
I may at a later date offer a shopping cart for some Texas related gifts or paraphernalia I may want to offer/retail to help pay my forum operational costs later on;
I'm not sure what else I need to share here for some informed and experienced opinions but if needed please advise and I will promptly reply if I know the answer. Be aware that I am a beginning novice at setting up and operating a message forum, especially a vBulletin (by far the best IMHO) so please try to keep the responsive technical terminology on a generally lay persons level if possible. If not, then I have some quick studying to do if I don't know the terminology.
I'm fairly good with HTML, a little Perl, a little bit of Javascripting and a bit of CSS stylesheets but that's about it. I know nothing of MySQL or PHP so I realize I have a lot of learning to do but I'll take it one step at a time as usual. Also, suggested reading with possible links for sources on PHP and/or MySQL or anything else you might deem relevant to doing what I desire to do would be kindly and greatly appreciated.
Thanks much in advance,
Ron H.
Okay, this would be a NEW forum and I'll need to build it from scratch (ver 3.0.0 I hope / presume). I have quite a few people awaiting the opening of it already and it will grow pretty quickly once word is spread within the community it will be designed to serve I feel. But regardless, I'll proceed here.
Allow me propose a potential message forum parameters and see what some of you think or suggest:
My forum would have somewhere between 1000 and 2000 members within a year or less (estimated);
Out of these maybe 35 to 70 may be online at the same time on average (estimated);
During times of major news events (example: the war in Iraq) the usage could/would jump by a factor of between 2 and 5 (or possibly even more) I'd suspect (based on several years of observation of other similar sites I'm currently a part of);
The forum would primarily have text posts with some images as it would involve political discussion and debates along with reposted news articles intended for discussion purposes. Naturally the posts would need to be archived for future retrieval and threading requiring a database (if that makes sense and is the correct terminology);
Hotlinking wouldn't be permitted due to the bandwidth considerations if determined to be a reasonable approach and bandwidth costs became a real $$ issue for me. (I admit to inexperience in this regard but have done some reading on the subject);
I'd like enough storage space for a complete backup in the event of a major vBulletin upgrade or some similar event requiring a large enough space requirement for that;
I may at a later date offer a shopping cart for some Texas related gifts or paraphernalia I may want to offer/retail to help pay my forum operational costs later on;
I'm not sure what else I need to share here for some informed and experienced opinions but if needed please advise and I will promptly reply if I know the answer. Be aware that I am a beginning novice at setting up and operating a message forum, especially a vBulletin (by far the best IMHO) so please try to keep the responsive technical terminology on a generally lay persons level if possible. If not, then I have some quick studying to do if I don't know the terminology.
I'm fairly good with HTML, a little Perl, a little bit of Javascripting and a bit of CSS stylesheets but that's about it. I know nothing of MySQL or PHP so I realize I have a lot of learning to do but I'll take it one step at a time as usual. Also, suggested reading with possible links for sources on PHP and/or MySQL or anything else you might deem relevant to doing what I desire to do would be kindly and greatly appreciated.
Thanks much in advance,
Ron H.