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This web hosting thread started by jomothepure on 10 September 2008

I’m sorry to join and straightaway get into a begging for info situation, and too I’m in the wrong section, but here’s my dilemma…

I am pretty ignorant on most of the technical aspects of the internet. I have a couple of websites, which I had cobbled together using my pigeon html coding, and were hosted using a free host. Beyond uploading files, my knowledge of hosting is therefore nil. I’ve toyed with forums too, but again they have been completely free and ‘ready-hosted’ so there’s been no need for me to look into hosting my own forum.

But now a project has come my way, which will involve a forum - like this one - as it’s centrepiece. Now you can take the following with a pinch of salt if you wish, but I expect the forum to be extremely busy from day one. Basically it’s come about due to a large internet group, which uses a forum heavily, needs to up sticks due to the users’ falling out with the company which provides the service, and the forum as an off shoot.

Anyway, that’s not really the important part.

Basically, I’m looking for advice on how to host my own forum for a (potentially) large user base. Please bare in mind too that I am a total novice when it comes to these things, and am rather thick to boot!

Firstly, when it comes to hosting, is there any difference in hosting specs I’d be looking at between a normal website and this, which is primarily going to be a forum, with perhaps one home page which directs to it? Should I be looking out for any particular software the host supports? (perhaps this depends on the forum software I use?)

Following on from that, what relates to the various features you get when you buy a web package.

For instance, what’s the difference between web space and bandwidth? My stab in the dark is that web space is the ‘space’ taken up by the actual pages of the website. For instance, my homepage, plus images etc. might be 1MB. Would each new page on the forum take up, however small, a certain amount of web space, and therefore the bigger the forum (or the more threads/pages/posts created) gets, the more web space I’d have to buy (assuming I want to keep all the posts and pages)?

The next part of my guess is that bandwidth relates to the visitors you get to the site. Am I right? And is there any way of putting real numbers onto this ie. 5000MB gets you X visitors an hour/day before it crashes? Maybe I’m asking how long is a piece of string here, and maybe I’m totally wrong to begin with on what bandwidth and web space relate to.

When it comes to forum software, what factors should I be looking at from the point of view of a host? Up until now, I’ve only been a user of a forum (other than tinkering about with free forums). For example, are there differences (pros/cons) between phpbb, vbulletin etc. that I should consider?
Basically, I am after a forum, the most important features of which will be that it is a) reliable, will not be prone to down time; and b) quick and easy for its users.

I probably haven’t made any sense at all here, but if you’ve picked anything up at all, and have any advice, I’d gratefully appreciate it.
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