Managed vBulletin Forums

[garryfinch]

I am looking for recommendations for a managed service for vBulletin. I'm not just talking about the hosting and server support but 'application' support as well.

We have some established forums and are creating new forums for several of the large web sites that we run, and we want to bring them all under one roof with support for the application and maintenance of the forums. We have in house staff to manage the running of the forum, it's the other bits we need.

Any suggestions? We are based in the UK, but that doesn't have to mean that the company needs to be in the UK, providing they off 24 hour support.

[pvo_dave]

Might well be worth contacting Nimbus hosting, I know Tim gave us a lot of help when we had vBulletin software issues in the past.

http://www.nimbushosting.co.uk/

Dave.

[TalkPhotography]

Yup, same here. Knows his onions and isn't afraid to get his hands dirty having a tinker under the bonnet. We've been with them glitch free since they started.

[Mark.B]

I'd agree with the above, talk to Tim at Nimbus Hosting.

They are vB specialists. they've hosted my site, some of the other vB staff, and a good number of vB customers, for a while now.

[syrus.xl]

I am UK based but I do not use a UK based hosting provider. I have been with www.urljet.com for over 3 years now and they provide Managed vBulletin Hosting with shared, vps or dedicated plans. I run 2 forums on a VPS, one is vBulletin 4, which they manage - obviously you pay more per each forum managed by them. You can phone them and they will go through your options, depending on your requirements.

They are US based, but provide you with a free CDN and use Litespeed servers, both of which will cause an increase in overall speed.

[TenPercenter]

If I had the same exact request and I am located in the US, would you give the same recommendation? Or would you suggest I go with a US based provider for managed VB hosting? I have no problem going with a UK based provider as long as the cost and the clock are not detrimental to the relationship.

[OrlandoVillas]

I would highly recommend Nimbus Hosting. We were looking to improve the performance of our existing vBulletin system and after some research decided to go with Nimbus as I'd seen a lot of good recommendations on various other forums.

We recently moved our hosting to them and since the move our forums are now very fast (several users posted on the forum to say they have seen a noticeable increase is speed). We are a UK and US based company and have users from all over the world, but mainly from the UK and USA.

I personally am based in Florida and although the server is based in the UK the performance is still better than our previous US based hosting. The staff at Nimbus were very helpful, and even with the UK being 5 hours ahead their response times were excellent even when it would be late at night in the UK (responses to pre-sales as well as post sales technical support typically 5-10 minutes).

Nimbus took care of the entire migration process from our old Windows based system (IIS7 / mySQL) to our new system with them (we opted not to go with Windows on our new hosting). They take care of backups (this is optional) and also can optionally take care of forum patches and updates.

[syrus.xl]

If I had the same exact request and I am located in the US, would you give the same recommendation? Or would you suggest I go with a US based provider for managed VB hosting? I have no problem going with a UK based provider as long as the cost and the clock are not detrimental to the relationship.

The "Time" factor is not a problem with vBulletin - if the server is setup correctly. Problems I have had in the past are related more to security, especially VPS and dedicated plans where the host has not hardened down the security enough, it doesn't take much to do this yourself - and could save you in the long run.

[JKerviel12]

Apparently EUKHOST is the biggest and best in the UK, from what I've heard.