hosting service for forum

[RandhirP]

If I want to run a forum then what kind of hosting should I take so that it would run smoothly without any problem?

[bluearrow]

A good VPS is the best for forum hosting. If you can't afford a VPS (30$ per month ?) Then go for Godaddy or Hostgator basic shared packages. Those have a good uptime and lot of real resources. Don't try a budget shared hosting provider because as soon as your forum gets very active he'll have to kick you out.

[franberries]

A good VPS is the best for forum hosting. If you can't afford a VPS (30$ per month ?) Then go for Godaddy or Hostgator basic shared packages. Those have a good uptime and lot of real resources. Don't try a budget shared hosting provider because as soon as your forum gets very active he'll have to kick you out.

so normal webhosting package can't run a forum? eventhough the webhosting provide unlimited diskspace package?

[wink0r]

eventhough the webhosting provide unlimited diskspace package?

There are nearly always, if not always, limits to unlimited hosting. You will find the limits in the TOS usually. The better shared hosting will state specific limits for various things. Lesser hosting will have a simple statement about your site not impacting others on the shared server. If they just use the simple disclaimer they can close your account with little explanation. One of the best that I have seen is Hostgator with a 250,000 inode (file) limit. Shared hosting may also limit the number of concurrent database connections as well as number of tables and size of databases. The connections and size of database limits could be sources of problems for an active forum. For small forums without too much activity there will probably be no problem, but if the forum becomes very active you will probably be looking at a move at some point.

[bluearrow]

Don't believe in those unlimited deals. Just imagine a site like imtalk forum which needs massive amount of bandwidth. You might think those unlimited offers are great for these sites. But it's not because scripts like forums eat up lot of Ram and CPU resources. A shared host can't handle this specially if provider is just a reseller or runs a VPS. So usually they states some where in TOS that each shard hosting account can use less than 5% server resources. So in reality you can't use all those "unlimited" bandwith. But big providers like Godaddy and Hostgator run their shared hosting accounts in server clusters so they have massive resource pools. You can will be fine with them for a while.

[rain22]

As I know, for a big forum need a dedicated hosting. But at the beginning, if there are no more members, can use a normal shared hosting without a problem.