Moving to a dedicated server
 

If I choose to move my forum and web site to a dedicated server in the future with my hosting company how doable is this? Is it a pain to move all of the data over for the forum?

I moved from a shared server to a GoDaddy server a few years ago. Pretty good specs for the price. There are many alternatives to GoDaddy, but their prices are reasonable with pretty good support (if you wanna pay for a little extra. I have never had ANY complaints with this comany and they will bend over backwards to make things right with the customer.

Sam Kilgore
www.AtlanticAnglers.com

I've done it multiple times. Its relatively easy. VB has good guides on moving an installation on their website.

Piece of advice, install it on the new server and get it working before shutting down the old site. This allows you to fix any large problems without more downtime than is required.

Great advice. :up:

thanks for the great advice. At what point (or size) of my board should I consider moving to a dedicated server? Right now I dont really want to fork out the $$$$ unless the site takes off...I have another board which has a little of 32,000 posts and is doing fine so far.

It's not the posts what should worry you, It's all about the users online, and what the server load is doing.

Yep. I have 145k posts, and that is nothing but a drop in the bucket. All of the threads, posts, and misc VB information in the database takes up under 200 MB. The file attachments take up about 1 GB.

What matters is how fast does your forum feel, what is the server load like, and is the server reliable.

Thanks guys. At what point did you choose to move to a dedicated server? (If you werent already at one). At what amount of "users online" did you find your board system to slow down?

I have 3 forums going now. The largest has 36K posts but only 250 members or so and most ever online was 172 (but I think most of them were due to the bots)

My new forum hopefully will take off and be much larger that is why I am "Planning ahead" and getting ready.

I did notice my hosting ocmpany offers 2 services for this and would appreciate any feedback...

They offer dedicated servers starting at $129 a month and they also offer virtual private servers starting at $49 a month.

Any opinions or comments?

The cheaper VPS had the following features for $49 a month....

Hosted Sites: Ideal for 1 busy website and up to 9 pointed domains.
Disk Space: 20 GB
Data Transfer: 1 TB
Memory: 128MB minimum, Burstable up to 1GB
Control Panels
Plesk™ 8 for Linux Virtuozzo™ Power Panel
10 Domains License
IP Address: Includes 1 IP
Software Installed:
RedHat Fedora Core 4 OS, Apache Web Server 2.0
PHP 5.0.4
MySQL 4.1.14

if you are planning ahead then just move to the VPS and don't worry about the money. If you are worried about the money then you should wait until you know whats going to happen.

Hey, if your still going for the VPS, I would suggest ASO. You will A+ support and really good server with the same $50.