[donnacha]

Thanks Filburt,

Originally Posted by filburt1

It would be an extremely powerful setup...

So, no need for Xeons, you think?

Originally Posted by filburt1

... but (no offense, of course) many think that their forums will be explosively popular but it does not take off. In either case, it would likely be months until you need the power, storage, and bandwidth.

Well, it's for an anything and everything discussion board, heavily modded to include selling/buying, dating, journaling and anything else that's useful to normal, everyday people living in and around Edinburgh city, UK, population c. 500,000.

There will also be a sister-site, geared towards younger Edinburgh-dwellers, featuring the arcade mod but sharing the same buy/sell database, hopefully giving them their own site will protect the level of discussion on the main site.

There's nothing similar already in existence despite fairly high broadband penetration in the area. I'm planning to buy a color laser printer, produce some nice, professional posters and flyers, all promoting the site as a good way to connect with people in the city and surrounding area, plan to put in a month or two full-time, getting the posters onto every supermarket, library and church hall notice board. It would be a bit of a tragedy if, after all that effort and expense, my server set-up couldn't cope with the traffic.

In effect, the whole thing will be non-commercial, I won't be bothering with ads, maybe I'll introduce Google-ads at some point but, initially at least, it'll be ad-free, should make it faster. My priority is to make it as pleasant an experience as possible for the user, hopefully build up a large enough userbase to be the defacto board for Edinburgh.

Although I figure that's a good investment in the longer term, it's obviously going to lose money now, so, I need to keep my server costs sane. What I'm worried about is that my 2 servers might not be sufficient to deal with a successful, city-focussed, multi-purpose board and that I'll end up still making no money but having to buy more servers.

Any thoughts?

BTW, I feel that, with VB3 about to go gold, the time is ripe for this; from what I've read here, VB3 is a lot more efficient and, hopefully, that means you get more bang per server.