[x3n0]

I've been up for a little over 8 months now. Getting about half a million hits a month and my numbers look like this:

Database Data Disk Usage 45.09 MB
Database Index Disk Usage 4.27 MB
Attachment Disk Usage 208.47 MB

Our forums are quite image intensive. Paid search indexing and magazine ads almost immediately doubled traffic. Expect fast growth for a specialty forum. I would never use a host unless I get the ability to lay hands on the server and have root access with the ability to configure SQL, Apache, and PHP on my own terms. Owned hardware and co-location at a server farm is the best option.

I store images and CSS as files instead of in the DB to reduce bandwidth usage by enabling caching of the attachments and stylesheets on the client machine. vB.com staff taught me this trick, it helps significantly.

We are already on our second server machine (catastrophic hardware failure) and have decided to stick with Sun/AMD hardware paired with redundant Barracuda SCSI in the future because of dramatically increased reliability and performance vs. cost. Next machine is planned to be one of those sleek new quad processor AMD/Sun Sun Fire V40z U3 servers:

http://store.sun.com/CMTemplate/CESe...P&catid=116125

MySQL performance is rumored to be exceptional and the prices are right.