does that mean when you have sites with over 5k people they get expensive to run :eek:

What is your obsession with sites with 5000 users?

I would gladly purchase a script / hack that does this for $35.00 If at all posible, i would like to have an affiliate type program built in, where each time a member refferes a nother member to the forum (current feature) and that member "donates" or becomes a paid member, the affiliate would get a commission. The reason behind this, is there are over 4500 cycling sites in the yahoo directory, i would love to have 5 - 10% of thoes sites promoting my forum to pay for there site :)

the number or registered users is probably the most irrelevant statistic as to how expensive a board to run is that you can find. Number of users online and daily page views and bandwidth usage give much better indications.

thats what i mean like how much bandwith do you guys use a day

That's what Chris is saying - he could give you numbers all day long but it won't be the same for you or anyone else because if you have 5000 members but only 10 of them post in a given day, it's going to cost a LOT less than if you have 500 of them post in a given day.

true dat

We used 15 gigabytes last month for the forums alone. It would have been closer to 30 gigabytes if we didn't have gzip compression turned on. I am currently working to double our traffic through various promotion techniques.


All told for the whole network we used over 60 gigabytes in the month of May.

damn

Forums: Last month just over 6 gigs (yes wluke, thank God for gzip!)

Entire Site: Last month just over 75 gigs

But the forums load our servers more than any other area of our website.

Now let's get back on topic. :)