MyBB Community Forums

Hello,

This my first post on the MyBB community, I've been doing some testing with MyBB and must say one thing... wow! I'm impressed by how much more organized it is compared to phpBB and vBulletin; believe it or not vBulletin is more of a pain in the lime than anything! So, I've decided to use MyBB for all my new community forums and plan to migrate my vB forums in the future.

Now, to my main question. I have no idea on the server requirements and resources needed for an active MyBB forum. I plan to use basically the main installation and a few mods. I always use dedicated servers for my forums and will do so with my newest project launching this month. I'm hoping some of you can give me some ideas on what server specs I'll need for my forum. I'm looking for CPU(type & speed), RAM and hard drive space; if you have opinions on bandwidth please share them, I usually have 1 Terabyte per month. Below are my estimated projects of the newest forum.

Total Members: 20,000 to 50,000 (maybe more)
Active Members: 500 to 1,500 (I hope more)
Operating System: FreeBSD

Due to my nature ability to get forums rolling pretty quick and excellent promotional skills I need to have my server ready from the start and not worry about upgrading in the future. I'm hoping all you who currently use MyBB can provide some insight. Note: If your basing information off your forum please provide your shared or dedicated specs and a URL to your forum... you can PM this information if they consider that spam on this forum.

To the curious; this will be a active forum related to golfing.

What makes you think you can get 20k+ members so quickly?

(2009-03-08, 06:49 AM)Bey Brad Wrote: [ -> ]What makes you think you can get 20k+ members so quickly?

Proper search engine marketing and optimization along with proper marketing and promotion on\off internet works pretty well so far. 95% of people approach starting a forum completely the wrong way. I'll lend a nice little tip that works well to boost thread\post count with useful stuff to increase inbound organic traffic.

(Note: This method is very time consuming and really only works with specific niches; example of a good one would be HTML or PHP related)

1. Locate IRC channels on 3 to 4 of the major active server networks directly related to your forums topic.

2. You'll want to log all chatter within these channels for at least 7 to 10 days.

3. You'll then want to branch out questions\replies\answers properly in a thread start, reply, answer format.

The main trick is to setup an IRC script that can guess conversation bundles and properly log them into seperate files; this can and will produce alot of useless data. You could easily stay just go through 1 entire log and manually pull data, what actually takes more time is up for grabs. (no you can't have mine )

The next pain in the lime is actually creating the fake accounts to post this data with; however using proper sql queries adding the actual thread replies isn't Then, use a 50:5 to 100:10 ratio to remove fake accounts properly. This is an excellent way to add "unique" content to your forum and draw in some nice organic long tail keyword traffic; and in turn produce more members.

However, other promotional methods work out much better, especially if you have a decent cash flow.

Maybe i will use Dedicated server when i have big community someday..

The number of members/posts etc doesn't have a huge impact. The main issue is the number of people hitting the server at one time. The most important thing would probably be RAM. I can't imagine the HDD to be too important unless you're getting a small one and your forum is heavily attachments based. Relative to the RAM, I can't say a strong CPU is required. And transfer is obviously dependent primarily on activity.

if the people are liking our forum, there must be interesting source and they have to register.. And after i've a lot of member.. Maybe i will using dedicated server.. But for now.. I think shared server i quit good enough now..

(2009-03-09, 06:41 AM)Yumi Wrote: [ -> ]The number of members/posts etc doesn't have a huge impact. The main issue is the number of people hitting the server at one time. The most important thing would probably be RAM. I can't imagine the HDD to be too important unless you're getting a small one and your forum is heavily attachments based. Relative to the RAM, I can't say a strong CPU is required. And transfer is obviously dependent primarily on activity.

RAM, RAM, RAM and more RAM. The more of a site you can have in RAM, and the more v
available RAM you have around, the more you're going to be able to do.

I'd have a server with no less than 4gb these days - and that should be fine for this site too.