Hosting on a Dedicated server???

[rjav8r]

I have my vbulletin set up on the prohosting servers. No problems.

Yet, I'm looking towards expansion in the future. I was looking at the dedicated servers offered by digital nation - I guess the same ones that host this sites board.

My questions (they may be lame but here goes):

1. How practical or easy is it to switch to a dedicated server with no experience in that area, and which one would you recommend for using vBulletin on Sun, Cobalt, Linux, NT?

2. How many vBulletin's could I host on one dedicated server and still have peppy speed across the board?

3. Is it possible to transfer a database to another server?

[Chad Simper]

1. Maintaining a dedicated server is not an easy task. You are completely responsible for it and you must keep it up-to-date with the appropriate security patches, upgrades software, etc. If you have the ability and knowledge to maintain a dedicated server, I would recommend it :) ... But, if you don't, don't let anyone tell you that it is a walk in the park, because it isn't. It takes time and patience.

2. This would depend on the setup of the server, and more importantly, the hardware. Not to mention the size and use of each of the boards. A fairly decent server (PIII 600 with 128 MB of RAM) could probably handle 10 good sized boards. It is so difficult to say just how many would work on a server though, without causing any side effects.

3. Very possible. You just have to do a mySQL dump (explained in the mySQL documentation) of the database which puts into a text file that you can upload to your new server and transfer it into the database on the new server. I did this a couple days ago with a large vBulletin board and the text file was about 30 MB... Took about 5 seconds for the entire file to be parsed by the server and for the entire board to be ready to go on our server.

I hope the above helped you out a bit!

[rjav8r]

thank you - helped very much