What server is best for my forum?

[vivid2k]

I know its been asked a million times, ive been going thru a lot of posts but here is my stats on my forum:

11,700+ registered members
400+ daily posts
Average users online at once is around 50 members + 150+ guests
38,000 monthly uniques

Running photopost, vbulletin 4.1.10 a lot of advertisements and average plugins but the site always seems very slow.

I am currently on a dedicated server but looking to move away from HostGator as every day the site gets really slow at certain times of the day and I have a decent package from them too, paying around $325/monthly

Thanks!

[Andy]

Are your members mostly regional to a specific area?

[vivid2k]

Mainly USA / CA and then UK/AU but mainly USA

[alemcherry]

Around 200 users online at a time and 1000+ uniques per day is very low traffic. I have hosted more popular sites on mid VPS with around 1GB RAM and you must be having a reasonably good dedicated server at that cost.

Your server not being able to server this many people is surprising. Moving to another host is a natural recommendation, but I do not know if it will really help. A sevrer of specific configuration is going to be same(almost!) with all hosts You may need to find the load at your server and the specific reason for performance issues. May be some poorly coded plugins, some other process taking too much load on the server.

If you are moving, take a look at URLJet. They may not be the cheapest, but considering your current budget, I guess they should be able to offer you something cheaper and should help you with any optimization issues.

[vivid2k]

Well I have recently moved to a UK server - http://www.nimbushosting.co.uk/ and I tell ya! I am happier than anyone right now! Tim rocked it out within a day and other additions the following day!!

My forum loads WAY faster than it ever has and we recently just put out a newsletter to 11k and been checking the forum all day to see any lag but we havnt received ANY slow down at all!!!

I am very satisfied with their service and will now recommend them to everyone hands down, I was with godaddy to hostgator and now nimbus hosting - who really went above and beyond for my forum!

Big thanks!!

[hostingyou]

yeah anyone that is using hostgator is paying 50% more in price, and getting 50% less in CPU/RAM/BANDWIDTH/EXTRAS..