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webhosting advice?

S

Saulbadguy

Diamond Member
I'm planning on hosting a sports-related forum. Currently the site uses 2500gb of bandwidth a month. On "game days" page views can spike to 84,000, but normally we run around 20k-30k. Not sure on the bandwidth usage yet.

Would anyone know of the costs i'm looking to incur? I noticed on alot of these companies sites, like bluehost.com, it lists 6.95 a month and 15,000gb, but am I missing something?

I want our forum pages to load reliably, although I would understand a slowdown on high traffic days.
 
I've used Canaca.com for years, a little bit more expensive than what you posted there, but still not horrible. Remember most of the sites that give you all that bandwidth will nail you on "CPU usage" or some other BS reason to shut you down for violating T&C. A dedicated server would work better for you, but you might be able to get by with a shared host.

Where's Rossman when you need him? Or any of the other experts?
 
Sounds like you might want to get a dedicated server. You might not fully need it yet but it would be easier to move now than in the future. I'm also assuming you expect reasonable growth in the years to come.
 
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.
 
2500GB of bandwidth a month is a lot for a forum. I don't see how 20-30k page views a day can amount to that much unless you're hosting a ton of images or videos.
 
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.
Click to expand...

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).
 
Originally posted by: l6873
2500GB of bandwidth a month is a lot for a forum. I don't see how 20-30k page views a day can amount to that much unless you're hosting a ton of images or videos.
Click to expand...

QFT. What is the URL of the forum? (PM it to me)
 
2500gb of bandwidth is A LOT, expecting to find hosting for $30 bucks is crazy, you'd be lucky to find good hosting that offer 250gb a month for 30 bucks without crazy overselling 2500? wow I say it won't happen or even close, my friends dedicate server cost him like $99 a month (good deal) and he gets like 500gb a month bandwidth if I remember correctly.
 
Yeah, OP, after looking at your forum, disabling sigs will enable you to keep your current hosting. That is what is killing your bandwidth.
 
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.
Click to expand...

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).
Click to expand...

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.
 
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