Originally posted by: Saulbadguy
Originally posted by: DeviousTrap
Is there a budget you're trying to work with (such as the $7 a month you posted), or would you have no problems if you were told $200 a month?
The biggest problem with the industry is people not understanding that you get what you pay for and therefore falling for the advertisements such as bluehost's.
Looking no more than around $30 a month. It's not business critical, and I would understand the server bombing on high traffic days (in which we have maybe one or two a year).
Well first, your numbers don't really add up if all that you're dealing with is text forum pages. I just looked at an old stat from a forum I host and on a month that had 5,495,782 page views the bandwidth usage was about 240gb. That's a tad over 183k a day, which is significantly less than what your usage appears to be.
If your numbers are similar to what the numbers are for that forum, then your bandwidth usage will only be around 100gb a month. That's a much more reasonable amount of usage, so you might be able to get away with a lot less than a dedicated server, but you really wouldn't want to put that much usage on a shared hosting account. Both, because of the resources that you'll use with all of those page views, and because you probably don't want to put your forums uptime in the control of everybody else that's on that same shared server.
If I were you, I'd research managed VPSes (Virtual Private Servers). They won't be nearly as fast as dedicated servers, but you'll at least have full control over the environment and won't be effected by other users (to the same extent, at least). Still, $30 is dirt cheap even for what you're trying to do. I'm obviously not in a position to judge whether you can afford a larger budget or not, but sites with that many page views could (relatively easily) be pulling in enough in advertising a day or two to cover a month of hosting.
Facebook
Twitter