I have a client that has around 1000+ visitors everyday and they wanted a forum. But afraid if my server won't hold.
My shared hosting spec is:
- 512MB RAM
- Shared multi-core CPU
- 10GB storage
- 100GBÂ bandwidth
It's a wordpress site and I want to install it on mysite.com/forum.
1000+ visitors a day isn't a big issue, the concern that I have is how many users can simultaneously access your site and it is possible that your current shared hosting might be able to hold well. You can anytime migrate your hosting to a better spec and I think you should give it a try.
The main issue is that during peak hours, if you have ~100+ users online at once, it's going to add up on the CPU. A modern CPU core could probably handle the a forum of that size if it were well optimized and adequate RAM was available. On shared hosting, it'd be problematic because most shared hosts tend to cap your CPU usage at ~25% of a core or so (depending on the provider) for consistent use. Anything else is for burst-only.
100GB of bandwidth isn't very good for a large forum unfortunately. I use 30-50GB of bandwidth on a small board, so you're definitely going to want several times that amount.
Managed VPS services might be along the lines of what you are looking for. You won't need a particularly big one (usually even the small to mid size VPSs are sufficient for most forums), but it will give you the flexibility and resources that you need.
For the rest, I'll leave it up to actual big-board owners. They will have much better advice than I will on how to host a large forum.
Do not stick thoughts on CPU capabilities. On a web hosting server, CPU is secondary - RAM and bandwidth ist first priority!
I have rarely seen any webserver running out of CPU caps but running out of memory!
1000 visitors a day is no big deal and I with specs mentioned above, I see no troubles on processing when the webserver (Apache, nginx etc) is well configured. A managed webserver is pre-configured and supervised by the provider though.
Regarding "100GB bandwith":
"Bandwidth" is an inappropriate term. So I guess there is 100 Gigabytes of full speed traffic guaranteed by the provider.
What happens when 100GB is reached?
Of course traffic is dependend on the usage of your members and guests - nobody can forecast traffic on a new forum system!!
Mind that there are a lot of Crawlers/Bots needs to be counted as visitors as well. MAybe these are already included in your 1000 visitors a day
[ExiTuS]