[jamiedolan]

Originally Posted by andrew.lee

@jamiedolan - Thanks for the feedback, and the compliments!

One thing you should probably keep in mind is that our customers almost universally substantially overestimate how many online users they have at any given time. I think this is largely due to forum software (including vBulletin) estimating the number of online users very poorly. It is usually off by a factor of 2 or 3 or more. Here's a forum, for example, that vBulletin claims peaked at 3417 users online, but I've never seen it over 400... http://www.w8baby.com/forums/forum.php

I've seen that before where the VB counter does appear to be quite high.

Originally Posted by andrew.lee

500 simultaneous users is a truly enormous site. The vast majority of our customers use and are happy with our Free or Basic plans. I'd encourage you to give one of our paid packages a (free) try and see what kind of usage you actually need. I suspect you'll find that you need a much cheaper plan than you realized. (We had a customer sign up the other day *convinced* he needed 3000 simultaneous. In reality he needed about 75...)

That's a pretty big difference. So how does it count the connections? If people are just leaving the forum window open in the background, does that count as a user? The numbers I threw out where high. I wasn't thinking of simultaneous chatters at all. However, I can see a moderately popular forum, say a 1000 visitors a day, end up with a couple hundred people with browsers windows open, even if they were not actively browsing, If I understand correctly, these would each use up a connection?

Originally Posted by andrew.lee

As far as self-hosting goes. It's not as simple as it sounds. I'm guessing your server runs apache -- if so, it wouldn't be able to handle 100 chatters much less 500. Apache just isn't built to handle that type of usage. This isn't to say you couldn't run a different server and learn how to set up real-time software up -- just that we've decided the support and usability costs of having a do-it-yourself version just aren't worth it.

Yes, I can understand and respect that the support load would indeed be very high for the majority of users. I forget how many people can barely manage to edit a php file. What are you running on LightSpeed? Lighttpd?

I'll be installing VBSEO's Gravity Insights this afternoon, which should give a very accurate accounting of who is really online.

I'm interested to know though; is the pricing really simultaneous chatters or people who have a browser open on your site? There is a huge difference there, and I was assuming the large number of connections I mentioned based on the latter.

Thank You for your response;

Jamie Dolan