Ipb V2.0 And Totalchoicehosting

[kosmasj]

Hello to all here!

 

I would like to ask a question and would like to get your honest answers please. I have a website at http://www.greeksoccer.com which I created back in 1997. After all these years the site has grown and am using IPB v2.03 for the forums section of it which is the most active part of the site. I get about 2,800-3,000 unique visitors per day and my forums have about 1700 users with almost 150,000 messages since we restarted the forums last year.

 

I have been to 2 web hosting companies (1 of them a very big Internet company) and both are not able to handle, as they say, the load on my site, whihc in turn is dog slowwww and is very annoying for my users... if you ask me it is the fact that those companies have "over-sold" their servers and that is why my site is lsow and me causing their problems...

 

I do not have a lot of money to spend... What would be the best option for me here to get an account with you guys? Will you ever tell me the same thing as these other web hosting companies?

 

I am simply frustrated with this ... any help would be greatly appreciated... Thank you!

[bellringr]

Hi I'm not a TCH employee or a techie guru, but I hope I can help a little until a mod shows up.

 

TCH definitely does not oversell its servers. There have even been discussions about the subject here on the boards. They closely monitor server activity and take any necessary steps if one person's site is running rampant using resources and causing everyone else's to slow down.

 

As for what your plan options are, you would need to figure out how much bandwidth you use in a month and how much disk space you need and compare that to the available packages here.

 

I've been amazed at the level of service here and how much time and care Bill puts into his company. I'll never go anywhere else.

[TCH-Thomas]

Bellringr is correct.

I´d like to add though that additional bandwidth and discspace can be purchased anytime. Also, you will receive a email when you reach 80% of your discspace and finally anything you use your space for will be included in both bandwidth & discspace (webpages, databases, emails...).

[kosmasj]

Thanks for your replies. Looking at the different packages the Platinum Plan is the one I want to go with. I order it, i put my forums on there and stay within the 2GB storage and 55GB bandwidth limits (UI understand I can purchase additional) if I start to see slow response time for my siet and come back to you and say" You know what my site is slow" will you come back and tell me you need to get a dedicated server? Also do you give SSH access to the site that I order?

[TCH-Dick]

We do not provide SSH access, as far as coming back and telling you that you need a dedicated server.....if we feel that you need one, yes we will tell you. If your site starts causing problems for other sites on the same server your site may be suspended.

 

Virtual hosting is not the ideal solution for a high traffic site, being popular has its disadvantages, and when it comes to hosting that disadvantage is usually the price your willing to pay. If you have already been told by other hosts that you need a dedicated server, odds are in time you'll hear the same from us. We simply cant let one site on a server affect all the other sites in a negative way.

[MikeJ]

While we only list limits on bandwidth and diskspace consumption, we also reserve the right to not allow sites that require too much processing time (therefore affecting the ability of other sites on the same server to be served). A forum of your size and level of activity is really not going to function well on any shared hosting environment because it requires a pretty substantial amount of cpu and disk access. Just as an example, these forums here are somewhat comparable in size and activity to yours, and these run on two dedicated servers to provide the performance you see.

 

For your own good, you really should be looking at dedicated servers, or virtual private servers (VPS) for that type of setup. Anything less, and you will not get the performance you desire, if you don't get outright suspended/terminated due to too much processing.

 

VPS is the cheaper of the two solutions, giving you your own "virtual machine" on a semi-shared server, but is not something TCH offers or has plans to offer, and still will have some restrictions on processor and disk usage. A dedicated server will give you the maximum benefits, but also with the maximum price as I'm sure you already know.

 

To answer your shell question, TCH does not offer shell access to any of our shared or semi-dedicated accounts.

 

I know these aren't the answers you were hoping for, but to be honest, you have outgrown shared accounts.

[kosmasj]

Thanks for you honest answers guys! I do not know what do now as a dedicated server is well out of my reach....

[MikeJ]

Thanks for you honest answers guys! I do not know what do now as a dedicated server is well out of my reach....

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

 

You have a pretty active community. There's value in that. You should research sponsorships, advertising, or even donation routes (although those often don't prove to be the most reliable) to raise the money needed to support your forums. You'll probably find that advertisors in particular place a lot of value on a highly active forums with a focused audience. I'm not sure how much of that you've done already, but it could help if you haven't.