May I ask for your advice, please?

I'm concerned about the rapid growth of my forum. I'm loving the traffic and all the new members but I'm freaking out - for lack of better words - about my hardware and server administration.

My board is still very new. We launched on 9/8/06 and our stats as of this morn are: Threads: 11,516, Posts: 99,982, Members: 446. We are averaging about 8 to 10 new members a day.

We are sitting on a VPS right now and it's doing an ok job. It has dual AMD Opteron(tm) 248 processors (2191.203 MHz / 1024 KB) and 512MB of RAM (1236 Burst) currently.

I know it's very premature to ask the big boy/girls about all this, but I'm not one to do things at the last minute.

I guess my question is this.... When did you make a move to major ($$$) hardware? Did/Do you manage your server(s) yourself, have you hired a company to do so or is it managed by your hosting company? I have come to the conclusion that I can not manage my own server. I just don't know where to start, but I'm so concerned about handing over such delicate access to someone I do not know.

Thanks for taking the time to read this!

[tobybird]

Please, not to be rude, but after 43 views and three days no one has anything to offer... Must you have a big board in order to get a reply here? I'm fairly certain each of you have been in this position before... I can't imagine that your forums started off as big boards. Is this basic information really that sensitive that it must be hidden? Ahh well, thanks for reading. And for clarification, I'm not complaining about the lack of response, but genuinely surprised as I would assume (my fault) that there are others out here like me that have no problems helping others grow.

Admins...mods, quite possibly this should be moved elsewhere... Thanks.

[Staxed]

your site is tiny...you shouldn't need anything more than you have now for a while...

how many people are logged in at one time on average? (this has more impact that total users and posts)

[tobybird]

Thank you for your reply. Yes, I do realize my site is small. We are only about to hit our six month mark. However, based on our current rate of growth I am hoping to be in the big board arena soon enough. lol Well we hope anyway.

Really my question was asked to understand the thought process of moving into higher end hardware. I guess reading back, it can be taken as a no brainer. Of course, server loads and concurrent users will dictate the move. I suppose I will just work off the data I have and make and educated estimate on that.

Thanks again!