How much space/bandwidth do I need from a host?

[diableri]

Hi folks. Thanks for the resources here and the great experiences I've had with vB forums over the years. Of all the boards I visit daily, I like the vBulletins the best so I think I have my board choice.

What I need help with is deciding what I need from a host. I'll worry about finding the host once I know what I need to buy.

I want to start a small user base (~100) community for a particular professional purpose. The board needs the normal forum stuff and what it will mostly do is network and feedback on our niche professional roles. I don't expect more than a few posts a day at the most save a few times a year when what we do generates hubbub.

1. News and research articles will be cited a lot off site.
2. Attachments in the form of Crystal Report files (sans data), .xls sheets, .txt documents containing SQL code and screen-shot pictures. I expect this to get fairly heavy use for the small number of users. ie I expect most members to dload all attachments.
3. Security is paramount in my mind due to the health care nature of our jobs. None of us will post things we shouldn't, but I'd like to have a strong answer for security (which I honestly know nothing about) when the topic arises.

I'm happy to provide more details if it will help a recommendation. Please feel free to ask anything.

That's about it. There are not a lot of people doing my job around the world and we have trouble getting together and sharing our unique challenges. A board sounds like a perfect solution to me and we've been pushing our vendors for sponsorship of such a community to no avail for years. So... here I am. =)

Any advice will be greatly appreciated! Thank you for your time in considering my situation.

[Steve Machol]

Please see the 'How much disk space do I need to run vBulletin?' section in the FAQ:

http://www.vbulletin.com/faqsales.php

[diableri]

Please see the 'How much disk space do I need to run vBulletin?' section in the FAQ:

http://www.vbulletin.com/faqsales.php

Yeah, I had found that already as well as extensive reading on the boards. That doesn't tell me what to expect with traffic though which is what I may be failing to ask in the correct manner. Thank you though!

So I see all these hosting packages but I don't know which one to choose. That's the part I need help with.

[Steve Machol]

There is no simple way to tell how much bandwidth you will need. For what it's worth I've never heard of someone not having enough bandwidth.

[nexialys]

i personally need 250 Gb of bandwidth per week... it is impossible to compare though, i have the biggest vb forum on the net... but it's a good evaluation if you want to compare your 100 members with my usual 2500 online members...

[Andy Huang]

Bandwidth consumption depends on several factors. As mentioned by nexialys already, forums that are extremely popular may require up to 250Gb of bandwidth per week from heavy amount of visitors, even if it is mostly textual content. On the other hand, if you have a very media heavy site -- IE: attachment includes videos and music; or background mp3 music; or other high bandwidth requirement content -- then you can see that much bandwidth required even if you don't have that much visitor. Typically, for start up forums, bandwidth is not a major issue. You should start from smaller plans with your hosting provider, and upgrade as your forum grow.

[diableri]

So if we upload several 1mb attachments for each user and all users dload those same attachments; that will pretty much equal the bandwidth I will need on a peak?

As an example, I have ~350mb of reports and files that I would like to share with my user base. A few other users will be the same and a few will be more than that. the majority of the user base will have a few files each; maybe 5mb.

If all my users swap these files, I'll still be ok with those small plans? What would be bad is I set everything up and all of a sudden I have to turn the site off because I can't afford to keep it running (this is completely funded by me personally, I do not expect to ever get any help covering the costs).

I hope that it's apparent why I would need to get an idea on costs in that light. I won't spend several hundred dollars on the software if I won't be able to afford the hosting.

Is there a better place to ask this question perhaps since it seems it may be innappropriate here or do I just need to blow the money and hope for the best? That's just not something I am used to doing normally.

[steven s]

Of course everyone's requirements are different.

I use 35Gb-50Gb a month of bandwidth.
Threads: 16,563 Posts: 164,364
Members: 5,692 Active Members: 328 (visit at least once every 10 days)

I also have a photo gallery and downloads section.

[Andy Huang]

No two different forums will require the same amount of bandwidth... unless both of them are just dead and have no visitor what so ever; then the bandwidth requirement would be 0 bytes per month.

If you have 350mb of reports, and you are certain everyone of your member base will download them at least once, then you can do the math of 350 x expected member count, for the amount of mb you will need to serve that file alone. This is the same for distributing any file on the internet... even without using vBulletin.

This page, as of right now, is around 24kb in size. This thread have been viewed 181 times, so it'd be 181 x 24kb = 4344kb, ~= 4mb; if we account for cache and other things, maybe the real bandwidth usage for this thread is around 1/2 of that. But, again, this differs between thread length (IE: first view of the thread is obviously significantly smaller than this and latter views), amount of text / images included in posts (IE: if I make a really really long post, it will be really really big for other people to view it; similarly with images), and amount of traffic you may get on a single thread differs (IE: If you only have 30 users, chances are, you won't exceed 50 views; if you have 172,869 users as we have right now, and the thread is very interesting, you may get 130k views, or 320k views depending on thread age -- and again, each of these view may differ in size).

As you can see, things vary a lot and base on a lot of different factors, and we can only tell you our forum's stats, and what bandwidth they use. Your actual usage will be very different than the rest of us.

I have a small start up forum with an adhoc service attached to it. There's 4.5K users approximately, with only 800 or so threads, and 1.5K replies; but I get lots of page views on the adhoc service I'm coding (this is also where the revenue are coming from), so thread and posts aren't that important to me. I average around 200mb bandwidth daily. The forum have been online for 3 months now, so it probably is on an average start. Assuming if I have the traffic I have today since day 1 (which, as we all know, cannot possibly be the case), I wouldn't even exceed 8GB of bandwith a month, which means just about any small hosting provider's small plans would be suffice.

My advice? Start small, don't worry about bandwidth allocation from your host too much, but keep an eye on your actual usage, and constantly do math to ensure you won't go over. Most hosting providers will be more than happy to allow you to upgrade to a higher service scope mid month if needed. As long as you don't exceed the alloted bandwidth, you won't get charged for overage (the real expensive stuff). In the absolute worst case (IE: host won't let you upgrade midmonth before you hit your alotted limit), you can always turn your forum off via Admin CP, find a different host that will suite your growth more (because the host that locks you in and won't let you upgrade is not worth keeping), and move to another host.

... I think I just added 2 to 3 kb for each view of this thread from the post above