Hosting: how big to support the mass?
 

I was wondering how strong is your hosting to support your forum?

I have 1000 GB of Web Hosting Space, and 1000 GB of Data Transfer (mo.), is this enough to hold a couple thousand members? Its just that I've seen around some people saying that they have to pay some serious money for hosting, while I just want to be prepared way ahead that I can handle without problems.

I've been running about 3800 posts per day this week....figger about 400GB of bandwidth for a month, and under 20GB for storage.

I did just dump $4500 on a new web server and am close to pulling the trigger on a $6000ish DB server, but the hosting fees themselves aren't ridiculous.

There are LOTS of variable tho...hosting video-type stuff is a bandwidth killer...

I run two soon to be big boards by the classification of posts.

One has 480,000 posts, 2200 members, 300 posts a day

The other has 86,000 members, 420,000 posts, 1000 posts a day

I use a Quad Xeon 3.4Ghz server, 4GB ram, 2000GB bandwidth.

Looking at buying another server to run just the databases very soon.

that is more than enough for those daily stats. Anyway Intel procs- are worse than AMD's.

If you are talking about having a couple of thousand concurrent / active members at one time, it really doesn't matter if you have 1000 GB of space and 1000 GB of bandwidth / mo. It's all about processing power, RAM and drives.. Of course, you do want quality bandwidth but that probably isn't going to be the weak link..

Are you on your own dedicated server?