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Hello,
I run a web site that is home to fans of a major league baseball team that has been in existence since the spring of 2000. The primary area of the site is the forum and we have happily been using vBulletin for a few years now. However, the board continues to grow every day, and this offseason has seen a large jump in the amount of new registered users, which was 104 last month and is on a similar pace this month. I know in the grand scheme of things that's not that many compared to some boards, but it is a significant rise from 24 and 36 new users in October and November, respectively.
Anyway, with the increased traffic has come an increased strain on our web host's server. Until recently, we'd been paying ~$50 a month and have been very happy with the performance for that price. I got an email that said the site has been moved to a dedicated server but our admin is worried that the amount of resources my site is demanding is going to prevent him from hosting other clients on the same server. Lately, we've been getting anywhere from 50-100 users surfing the board at a given time, depending on the time of day, of course. VBulletin reports my current figures as follows: 0.46 0.38 0.29 | 72 Users Online (38 members and 34 guests). I have been advised to find a way to reduce the amount of bandwidth my site is generated, which is supposedly double what it was when it was originally moved to the dedicated server.
Currently, our hosting bills are paid for by site visitors who have been kind enough to donate money to keep the site running. In turn, these peopled are made subscribers and are given some extra perks vs. the non-subsribers, such as avatar use, custom titles, expanded PM message boxes, ability to post attachments/polls, etc. I think if it was really necessary, these type of loyal visitors would help cover the increased costs but I don't think that's fair to expect more out of them due to all the new users/increased traffic the site has been getting lately. Instead, I'd like to a). find a way to reduce the site's bandwidth and b). turn some of the non-subscribers into subscribers.
A bit of information about the board: it is running the latest version of vB (3.0.5), I have next to no hacks installed - none of which should be causing much additional server strain, avatar use is restricted to subscribers (only 75 out of 1,719 registered users), and images in signatures are not allowed. Additionally, I have deleted about half of the smilies the board had, which leaves the total count at about 50. Attachments are rarely posted since that is a subscriber-only thing. Post icons are disabled. Who is online is enabled.
Now for a few things I suspect MAY be causing the bandwidth to be higher than it could be: there is one HUGE thread that is in the non-baseball section that has been in existence for some time. Users typically use it to chit chat about their daily events and it is extremely popular. However, it currently contains 50,813 replies and 214,535 views so it is loaded quite frequently. While it is popular, if it would save a lot of bandwidth, I'd have no problem getting rid of it. Next, our database size is about 450 MB. I used to prune posts regularly but because of a virtually unlimited amount of space with this host, I haven't done it in a long time. Posts currently go back to January of 2003. Would pruning a lot of these old thread reduce bandwidth?
Anyway, as I mentioned above, given our desire to not pay double what we are paying now, which would be $100 a month, we'd much prefer to reduce bandwidth and increase the subscriber rate, which would help cover any additional costs. Given the background of our site, as I have described, does anyone have some ideas to help keep our site running and our users happy? Thanks a lot for the help.
Boss
I run a web site that is home to fans of a major league baseball team that has been in existence since the spring of 2000. The primary area of the site is the forum and we have happily been using vBulletin for a few years now. However, the board continues to grow every day, and this offseason has seen a large jump in the amount of new registered users, which was 104 last month and is on a similar pace this month. I know in the grand scheme of things that's not that many compared to some boards, but it is a significant rise from 24 and 36 new users in October and November, respectively.
Anyway, with the increased traffic has come an increased strain on our web host's server. Until recently, we'd been paying ~$50 a month and have been very happy with the performance for that price. I got an email that said the site has been moved to a dedicated server but our admin is worried that the amount of resources my site is demanding is going to prevent him from hosting other clients on the same server. Lately, we've been getting anywhere from 50-100 users surfing the board at a given time, depending on the time of day, of course. VBulletin reports my current figures as follows: 0.46 0.38 0.29 | 72 Users Online (38 members and 34 guests). I have been advised to find a way to reduce the amount of bandwidth my site is generated, which is supposedly double what it was when it was originally moved to the dedicated server.
Currently, our hosting bills are paid for by site visitors who have been kind enough to donate money to keep the site running. In turn, these peopled are made subscribers and are given some extra perks vs. the non-subsribers, such as avatar use, custom titles, expanded PM message boxes, ability to post attachments/polls, etc. I think if it was really necessary, these type of loyal visitors would help cover the increased costs but I don't think that's fair to expect more out of them due to all the new users/increased traffic the site has been getting lately. Instead, I'd like to a). find a way to reduce the site's bandwidth and b). turn some of the non-subscribers into subscribers.
A bit of information about the board: it is running the latest version of vB (3.0.5), I have next to no hacks installed - none of which should be causing much additional server strain, avatar use is restricted to subscribers (only 75 out of 1,719 registered users), and images in signatures are not allowed. Additionally, I have deleted about half of the smilies the board had, which leaves the total count at about 50. Attachments are rarely posted since that is a subscriber-only thing. Post icons are disabled. Who is online is enabled.
Now for a few things I suspect MAY be causing the bandwidth to be higher than it could be: there is one HUGE thread that is in the non-baseball section that has been in existence for some time. Users typically use it to chit chat about their daily events and it is extremely popular. However, it currently contains 50,813 replies and 214,535 views so it is loaded quite frequently. While it is popular, if it would save a lot of bandwidth, I'd have no problem getting rid of it. Next, our database size is about 450 MB. I used to prune posts regularly but because of a virtually unlimited amount of space with this host, I haven't done it in a long time. Posts currently go back to January of 2003. Would pruning a lot of these old thread reduce bandwidth?
Anyway, as I mentioned above, given our desire to not pay double what we are paying now, which would be $100 a month, we'd much prefer to reduce bandwidth and increase the subscriber rate, which would help cover any additional costs. Given the background of our site, as I have described, does anyone have some ideas to help keep our site running and our users happy? Thanks a lot for the help.
Boss
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