Drupal Hosting : Switching Host & Changing to Drupal

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This is a drupal question asked by mcgin on 22 October 2007

I currently have a hosting package which I am not happy with for various reasons, but largely low availability & slow response times. I wanted to tap into people’s expertise here to find out what type of package I should be considering.

To give you a bit of background info, I currently have a forum on a shared host with approx. 2000 members. I am not currently using Drupal, but as part of upgrading to a better provider I plan on integrating my forum (SMF) with Drupal 5 which sounds like it’s possible without too much effort, hence the posting here, as I want to understand the load that will introduce on the server.
Within the next year I expect to have about 6000 members based on current growth. The most users I have had signed in at any one time so far has been 200, so I’m probably looking at 300-400ish if I hit 6000 members within the year. The typical number logged in though is around 20-30 (read 40ish when at 6000 members).
Typical bandwidth usage per visit is about 500K. I expect this to come down slightly though once I get a chance to do some optimizations. I get about 20,000 visits per month right now too.

So my question is once I upgrade to Drupal, considering there will be more interaction with DB etc. and given the rough figures above, should I need something like VPS, or will a shared host be sufficient? Anything else I should consider like the DB being on the same machine?

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