Hello all!!!!!!!

My forum has been exploding in growth. I use a webhosting company (i dont know if I can say the name of it, but it has been excellent). Anyway, I am getting a little concerned. It is a shared hosting and I am wondering at what point to I need to think that shared hosting will be too small and will have to go to the more expensive dedicated hosting.

I am wondering at what point do you realize your forum is getting too big for shared hosting? How many members/threads/active online users is too many for shared hosting? How much disk space would you need to support a forum that has over 1000 active members??????

I am still learning about this as I am a new webmaster, but this thoughts are beginning to cross my mind as our forum is really growing.

Thanks again for your input and any info you can give me.

Because all info is stored in the mysql table it isn't going to grow very fast I never had any database hitting 1gb or something like that I'm running atm a board with 7k users, still growing every day. And it's running fine on shared hosting. At vbulletin.com they have alot of these questions answerd in there resource section. Check out the performance threads etc.

I am so glad to hear this! Thanks for the reply and link to more information!!!!!

I would think shared hosting would be a problem when you start having over 200-300 members online at any given time.

all depends on what kind of board you are having, what you are running on the server in total and off course the physical limitations

for 1 board, unless you are going to host a heavy bandwith/loads of diskspace requiring forum, you'll almost never need something else then shared hosting

try to upgrade to a better hosting plan when you as admin think hostong is starting to suck as you will have the account that generates the most queries

I switched to my own dedicated server when it became impossible to do database backups the easy way. My bigger forum's database now approaches 500 megs in size and tools like PHPMyAdmin or others just down give me the functionality anymore. I also have 70-120 users online most of the time and a dedicated server just provides more power and a better experience.

Christoph

Thanks for you input!!!!!!