Hi,

I'm looking for a new host for my site and thought I'd ask this community it's recommendations.

Over the years of running ubbthreads (wwwthreads oh so long ago) I've been on several different ones. I'm currently on a shared hosting plan with Hostican, but when they put in some cpu monitoring several months ago, it forced us to disable some of the forum features, and many users have been dissatisfied with those changes...such as removing the new posts/topics from the category view as well as the forum view.

My question is, for a board of my size/usage, am I kidding myself that a shared host environment is ok, or should I really just start looking at the more "heavy" options such as virtual servers, etc.

We've currently got just under 1700 users, 68 forums (not all of them active) 23.3k topics and 254k posts. Our max online was 57 just a few weeks ago.

What are my key considerations? In the past, it was mainly bandwidth and disk space, and with the recent host obviously now cpu utilisation, should that be all for us?

We're an online gaming guild and as new games and MMO's come online, we tend to get spikes in recruitment and activity as the new games go. Age of Conan has increased our usage over the past month by quite a bit, and I would expect that to continue for some time.

So, to sum up, based on the above, what type of hosting should I be looking for if I want to fully enable my site with all the rich features of 7.3 and also, any recommendations to specific hosts. The only limitation we really have is as most do, and that's financial. While in the early days I bore the costs for our site, over the years we've sustained ourselves on donations from our community. From that "pot", we pay for both our hosting and a ventrilo server and we rarely exist with a lot in the bank, having to resort to cash drives as bills come due for our major services.

Thanks in advance,

Joel
The Ancient Order

Shared hosting did not work for me. I found that even though I was using nowhere near using the bandwidth I was to receive with my shared hosting account I would be shut down daily. It seems that whenever the server would get overloaded they would just shut down the biggest consumer of cpu power which was me. There is no talk about using cpu power when signing up for shared hosting.

Virtual Private Servers (VPS) present a similar problem for me. I recently had a situation where I moved to a VPS on a hosting company and paid for what I thought was an upgrade in service (more ram, etc.) from my old host. Immediately I began having problems - which again was related to the usage of CPU power.

The amount of kernel memory you are alloted is set when they first set up the VPS and is often the same for every plan the host sells. So if you sign up for the cheapest plan or the most expensive plan - you end up with the same outage problem. The tech support will keep telling you the problem is related to your not having enough ram and try to get you to move up to a more expensive plan however.

Really what you you need to do when checking out VPS providers is ask them all how much "kmemsize" you would get and then compare. There are other settings that may be problematic too but for my average-traffic board it was the "kmemsize". The type of control panel you get with the VPS also impacts this - so it is not an exact science.

I was lucky that I only paid for a month and did not opt for the attractive yearly option so I could easily exit the poorly performing VPS and move back to my old one - I would recommend that anyone considering a VPS do this as well and consider a month payment as a "try before you buy" and don't close the door at your old host until you are sure the new one can handle your board.

Sorry, I can't recommend a good host for you as the VPS that was not working for me seems to work well for others - so every situation will be different.

i went with dedicated at http://lunarpages.com -- got a very nice box and have totally customized it for threads..

latest php, apache, mysql and even ruby now

shared and VPS just don't offer the flexibility to grow and i don't have any recommends on hosts..

so here's a vote for dedicated, if your forum(s) can sustain the price..

I guess an advantage to dedicated would be the ability to maybe even host our own ventrilo/teamspeak as well, thus bringing some of that expense back into the "capability" of payment....or would that not be a good idea?

yeppers