How Big is too Big
 

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Looking to expand my current board system with discussions by each region in my state (NJ). My plan is to have each county listed (21 Total) - each one leading to a section of child forums listing towns located in each specific county (each town would act as its own forum under the county). Each county may have anywhere from 20 - 30 towns listed so that right there would give me a total of 600 forums or so on the system.

My question is, at what point should I be worried about having too many forums thus possibly making the system unstable? As far as the rest of the board goes I only anticipate a few handfuls of other forums so I should definitely be under 1,000 forums.

I am currently NOT on a dedicated server

Any input would be appreciated.

Up to 1000 forums would not be a problem, even with shared hosting. I have 107 forums only taking up 37kb of space in the database (that is the forum table, not threads/posts).

We currently have 1400 forums, and our board involves a lot of forum creation (and destruction).

Never had any problems with it, though we are on a dedicated server.