How to find out what server's are required to host a Vbulletin 5.05 forum?

[fionix]

The titel says it already. How can I find out what server is required to host our forum. It receives less then 500 users / visitors a day.

Any help would be much appreciated.

[Wayne Luke]

Minimum Requirements

vBulletin is a web-based application and as such has a few minimum requirements. To run vBulletin, you need a web hosting provider that includes the following things:

• PHP version 5.3.7 or greater
• MySQL version 5.1.5 or greater
• A pre-registered domain name
• 1 Gigabyte of hard drive space
• Rewrite Engine – A rewrite engine is needed for vBulletin’s Friendly URL routing to work. Popular rewrite engines include mod_rewrite on Apache and “URL Rewrite” for IIS 7 or greater.

Most hosting providers have already installed these applications on their servers. With the above requirements meant, the vBulletin software will run on any operating system using any modern web server software.

Recommended Requirements

The following settings and software packages are not required but will make your vBulletin experience more enjoyable. Your hosting provider can tell you whether these are available on your server.

• Latest PHP 5.4.x release
• MySQL 5.5 or greater.
• cURL or OpenSSL support – Allows secure connections to third-party services like Facebook Connect.
• MySQLi support – MySQLi is a more robust software library to connect to the database that vBulletin uses.
• Iconv support – A library that provides extra language and character set support.
• OpCode Cache – An OpCode Cache like APC or XCache will enhance the performance of your vBulletin software. An OpCode Cache is a caching mechanism that can significantly increase the performance of vBulletin by pre-parsing the PHP files and keeping commonly used data in memory for rapid retrieval.

Once you have a web hosting package meeting the minimum requirements, you are ready to proceed with vBulletin. For help in finding an appropriate web hosting company, please view our Hosting Options forum.