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
