How Big Can You Be Before you Go Dedicated ?

[DieselMinded]

Current- 277 (67 members and 210 guests)
Our Main Stats - Threads: 17,316 Posts: 229,485 Members: 6,817

Server Load Averages 1.74 2.76 2.73

Lucky the loads that low ive seen 20's and everything in between All month i cant take it anymore , Im jumping from $75/mth to $250/mth and getting a fully managed Dedicated server .

DONT SPAM MY PM BOX , i already have my host ,

Im courious HOW BIG WAS YOU WHEN YOU WENT DEDICATED?

[PremierFootball]

I had the following on my old forum:

Threads: 100k+ Posts: 300k+ Members: 7,000+

And I was on a shared host, the forum ran smooth with no problems.

I always had roughly 10-20 people online.

[DieselMinded]

Shared was 15 online at a time then My VPS was doing 30 online at a time fine but now its 70 and its struggling

[FockerFGAA]

From what I basically tell (and someone can correct me if I am wrong), but it won't really be the number of users per say, but basically from all the stuff you have on your site how much memory/cpu is going to be used at any given time by your site. I noticed your site has a lot of subforums and what looks like a decent chunk of mods. So really it depends on how much load those mods put on your site, but if you are having problems right now it may be an errant script or a mod that needs updated more than the number of users you have on your site.

[DieselMinded]

Yeah i have been looking for a mod that could be causing it but spikes are so speratic its impossible for me to find it

[ORP]

My load averages were lower than yours but my ISP allotted Kmem and other stats so that they could force me to upgrade before it normally would have been needed. It appears you got as much out of your vps as could ever be expected. You got at least 1/4 further than I did before upgrading.

[DieselMinded]

Thanks ORP that post makes me feel much better that im making the right move and stepping up now .

Who else has some input as to vps to dedicated jump and when to do it

[SEOvB]

VPS can handle like well over 100 people online at a time. I've had VPS servers handle from 150-300 users at once with no problems before.

512MB gaurenteed ram, with up to 2GB burstable and it had no problems.

[DieselMinded]

My VPS is only guaranteed 20% of the CPU power on my node and it can burst up to 96% , Maybe you were allotted more CPU %

[kermit2]

Current- 277 (67 members and 210 guests)
Our Main Stats - Threads: 17,316 Posts: 229,485 Members: 6,817

Server Load Averages 1.74 2.76 2.73

Lucky the loads that low ive seen 20's and everything in between All month i cant take it anymore , Im jumping from $75/mth to $250/mth and getting a fully managed Dedicated server .



Don't forget that the server load average doesn't take into account how many CPU cores you have. If you had a load of 20 on a quad core machine, it'd be roughly equivalent to a single core machine with a load of 5

[dan_p]

We made it to around 700 concurrent users sustained on 1 massive web server and 1 massive database server before we had to upgrade. Now we're on 1 massive database server with 4 massive web servers and I believe this will last us for a long time to come. Our bottleneck was never our database, it was always the web server.

[ssslippy]

Ive got a web server and a db server both high end but not top end running 2k to 2.5k users at a time with a 15 min timer out.

Optimizing your server running proper cache system and a solid OS is what keeps a server running.

I never bothered with a VPS, u can get a cheap dedicated for the price of VPS.

[typatton]

Sorry to put this really off topic but I was looking at your diesel bombers site and it looks really good. Where did you learn how to do all that because I have been looking around and I am not getting a whole lot of help on how to modify my vbulletin.

[azn_romeo_4u]

I think the problem with forums is the amount of posts. Once you get over the 1 million mark, IMO you have to go dedicated because one forum search for like a 3 letter word could be crazy. I had a forum with 1600 users on at one time, it was on an old ass p4 2.8gz xeon. Of course it didn't handle it too well but it settle down. I think I had 500k post at that time. I got on the front page of digg that's why =D

I would recommend for you, a server in the 150-250 price range. IMO, a quad core core 2 duo with like 4 gigs of ram would suffice. Ram is the most important when it comes to forums is what I notice.

[DieselMinded]

New Server has been Doing great

Our Main Stats - Threads: 20,308 Posts: 267,976 Members: 8,475

0.68 1.03 1.06 | 282 Users Online (50 members and 232 guests)

Dell PowerEdge server
Dual Xeon 2.8 GHz, 533 MHz FSB, 2x512 KB cache, HyperThreading ready.
4 GB ECC Registered memory
5x73 GB SCSI 10000 rpm drives in RAID5
1x36 GB SCSI 10000 rpm drive as HOT SPARE (or you can configure these 5 drives as RAID5)
PERC hardware RAID controller with 64 MB cache and BBU (enabling fast and safe write-back operation)
CentOS 5.x OS

[rin]

I did 25GB traffic per day when my old, shared host kicked me.
Back then I probably had around 3000 members with 20.000 posts.

[kevcj]

I did 25GB traffic per day when my old, shared host kicked me.
Back then I probably had around 3000 members with 20.000 posts.

You did 25gb per day, with only 3,000 members and 20,000 post?? I do about 2 - 3 gigs a day, with 490,000 post and over 12,000 members. With only 3,000 members you were going through some serious bandwidth.

=============================

To answer the question about the dedicated server, I have 3 vbulletin forums, and 4 wordpress sites on a Virtual private server with 1 gig of memory. The server gets around 9,000 uniques daily and somewhere around 3 million page views monthly. I still have a ways to go before I max out my VPS.

A lot of it depends on the graphics that your site uses. If you are hosting your own videos, picture galleries, big header images,,,,, Its impossible to tell you exactly when you will need a dedicated.

On average my forum has around 300 - 350 people on it. Usually its around 1/2 members and 1/2 guest. Around 3,800 members visit every 30 days, my forum averages around 1,500 - 2,100 post per day.

Out of that 1 gig of memory on my VPS, I have around 300 - 400 megs free. CPU usually stays around 150% - 200% of my allotment.

In can see getting an entry level dedicated server in another 4 - 6 months.

[nickwilliams99]

214k user forum on one webserver, always fast. 600 - 1000 users online at anytime.
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[MOGmartin]

VPS can handle like well over 100 people online at a time. I've had VPS servers handle from 150-300 users at once with no problems before.

512MB gaurenteed ram, with up to 2GB burstable and it had no problems.

as soon as I hit about 300 concurrent users my VPS with 1gb died the death - but after removing most of my plugins it worked better... so it depends on the total database strain you are doing.

[Deriel]

I would say that when you consistently get 200-300 users on-line at the same time its time to search for dedicated. I have one big forum (1.8M posts, 45k users), one minor forum and a dozen of sites and blogs in a U$119/month unmanaged dedicated server (Xeon 3210 / 4GB RAM / 2x500GB RAID-1 HDD). The AdSense from the main forum pays the server :)

[DieselMinded]

Update
Our Main Stats - Threads: 21,039 Posts: 278,245 Members: 8,883
0.83 1.02 1.10 | 354 Users Online (80 members and 274 guests)