Upgrade stages

At what stages in your forum's life or development did you need to upgrade your hardware and server setup (what were your forum's stats, active members per day, posts-per-day, etc.)? What did you upgrade from and what to? How many times have you had to change your hosting environment to suit your forum's growth? Lastly, what changes and expansions to you foresee in the future?

 

My first forum established about 8 years ago and after about half years it grow to the stage where I couldn't afford to buy one dedicated server at that time. I gave up and closed my site. There were more than 15 000 unique visitors daily including the return visitors.

 

50 people online at once on a regular basis, and the number of 'my sql has gone away' errors everyday growing, 10/day?

shared->vps. I seriously doubt we will outgrow our vps company.

 

Who are you hosted with, Abomination?

 

Our main site was with Hostgator shared, and we moved to servint vps (smallest package) a few months ago. Which is similar to going from a 1963 vw bug to a new vehicle. Servint is awesome.

HG on the other hand is one big train wreck, especially in the last 5 months, much like vb4.

 

I'm hosted with GoDaddy.Com...

I was running the smallest package for nearly 3 years till...

BOOM! :bomb:

I upgrade to VB4 and the members started pouring in the door and choked the server with a limit of 50 concurrent connections within about 1-2 months of getting VB4 put in. So I went to the deluxe package which doubles everything bandwidth, space and connections.

 

Mopar: did the number of people online increase significantly or was it the software change?

 

Ummm... Yeah...

Now back in Nov 09. I was getting typically about 6-10 members a day. That all.

As for currently I'm varying about 35-50 members a day. Now this is logged in members this doesn't count the other 200 a day to the HTML pages plus 225 a day on the forum (Google information) for a total of 450-500 people a day. Most crowded time is right in the evenings (6-10pm). I've actually seen the server quit twice and not respond because of the load. Call GoDaddy and ask them and the told me straight out I was at my limit!

Funny part is I ran the PHP 3.x for over 2 years and never made it to Google search engine very well. Membership was poor no matter what I did.

Now with VB4 install member in the last 3 month has risen 300% since Nov. (No joke). Google is now giving me about 2,000 referals a month and growing! My information is competitive with other big forums and now I tend to shared the link juice with the main stream!

 

So you're saying that vB 4 is what resulted in the influx of activity? Is there any particular reason for that?

 

Yeah, was it a vB 3.x to vB4 upgrade? Or was it a different forum script that was converted to vB?

 

Mopar1973Man: I would consider looking around for another place to host your forum. I don't use google stats so I really cannot compare, but when we had shared hosting we had 40 people constantly clicking on the forum all day long with no trouble.

But we were using vb3.8 with almost no modifications.


Regardless, if possible, a forum should have enough resources to function no matter what software is being used.

 

+1 ServInt is off the hook!

When I was first starting the DJ board we were a little shaky with hosting. We moved a few times due to down time issues and sluggish page loads. I tried to keep the hosting costs to a minimum because it was coming out of pocket but slow page loads and downtime for hours (once or twice days!) at a time is unacceptable.

After train wrecks with a few shared hosts I moved to the base VPS with ServInt with was like night and day as far as speed and reliability. Once we starting gaining more activity (about 100 returning members on a daily basis) things got a little slow so I upgraded to the Ultimate VPS with ServInt. With the upgrade I took on the hosting and technical management of two smaller forums to help with the costs.

Today the our advertisers are pretty stable and the site pays for itself I no longer need the hosted client to offset the additional cost of the higher end VPS but he and I have become friends and I'd feel bad for leaving him high and dry.

For my next forum, I'll start on shared hosting with a decent company like ASO and get a second VPS with ServInt when the time is right.

 

100 different people per day, and you needed to upgrade?

We handled 100 people at the same time the other day, no problem, with the smallest package. You may want to contact ServInt to see if they can optimize your server a bit.