SDX Experiences for busy Vbulletin forum

[Carsafety]

Greg recommended that I post here to ask for comments from users who currently host Vbulletin (or any) forum on the semi dedicated plan.

I operate a website and forum for a non profit website. The forums currently have about 2500 users and generate about 20,000 posts a month. At any given time, 250 members and guests are online (15 mins cookie period), with peaks well over 300 according to Vbulletin's who's online feature. The forum and website are approaching the 40GB transfer limit of our current standard shared plan. The other needs are pretty modest, 1 GB disk space, 3 addon domains, only the 1 SQL database.

I'd be curious to know if anyone using the SDX plan has a forum of simiilar or higher activity. I understand it is the concurrent users and the CPU/memory load that is probably the main issue for hosting our websites. I'm sure it's a huge upgrade from the $50 a year plan we have now, but I would also like to know how much room for growth might be expected. The forums have more than doubled in almost every measurable statistic in each of the last two years. If you have a public forum on the SDX plan, I'd appreciate a link!

Thank you!

www.car-seat.org

[Doug Nelson]

Sounds very similar to mine. I used the SDX plan for a couple of years, then suddenly got my site shut off because I was taking too many resources. It was odd because my traffic was actually off quite a bit when jag announced I was using too many resources.

I moved to a VPS, but it turns out I'd gotten bad sales advice and shouldn't have made that move. And since the closest dedicated server to the resources of the SDX plan is 10X the price, it put me in a difficult spot. I couldn't afford the dedicated server, so I ended up having to shut down parts of my site until my resource usage dropped to acceptable levels.

So no, I wouldn't recommend the SDX plan for you.

[Carsafety]

In terms of traffic, the forums are by far the main driver. Our other needs are pretty modest right now compared to the SDX limits, about 30-40GB traffic a month, 500-600MB disk space, not much of anything else in terms of domains, email, databases, etc. It's basically the concurrent users for our forums that seem to be driving CPU/memory resources. I also can't afford anything significantly higher in cost. I am going to begin accepting donations and seeking a sponsor, but a high-end dedicated package is likely to be impossible.

Being shut off without a warning is a bit discouraging. That could really affect our user community. Thank you for the input- I'd love to hear from anyone else with a forum of similar or larger size using the SDX plan or anything else similar in price.

[Ron]

You should get input from Vin DSL on this....

Doug, I don't know why you would be having a resource problem on SDX with that level of usage... seems like something is wrong there. Have you tried to identify the resource issue?

[Vin DSL]

You should get input from Vin DSL on this....

Doug, I don't know why you would be having a resource problem on SDX with that level of usage... seems like something is wrong there. Have you tried to identify the resource issue?

I was keeping my nose out of this 'cause I don't have an active forum... but, really, I get a lot of traffic, have 100's of visitors online 24/7, pound the sql server mercillessly, average 80k-100k page views a day, 200-500 views every 5 minutes, yada, yada... so there probably isn't much difference between my production site and a busy forum.

Simply put, SDX rocks!

To be honest, my web site was crashing regular shared servers here. I'm NOT proud of it - just telling it like it was. That's how I ended up on SDX.

Truthfully, my web site doesn't even make SDX breath hard - even at it's busiest! It's amazing!!!

I haven't had to contact Tech Support in months! LoL!

Anyway, if you can crash SDX, you're a better man than me!

[the_ancient]

Sounds very similar to mine. I used the SDX plan for a couple of years, then suddenly got my site shut off because I was taking too many resources. It was odd because my traffic was actually off quite a bit when jag announced I was using too many resources.

I moved to a VPS, but it turns out I'd gotten bad sales advice and shouldn't have made that move. And since the closest dedicated server to the resources of the SDX plan is 10X the price, it put me in a difficult spot. I couldn't afford the dedicated server, so I ended up having to shut down parts of my site until my resource usage dropped to acceptable levels.

So no, I wouldn't recommend the SDX plan for you.

did you ask for any further investigation, Was something changed or Upgraded around that time?

I would have been looking in to why resource usage went up, while traffic was going down, something there does not fit with reality

[Doug Nelson]

I don't want to jack Carsafety's thread, all my woes and efforts are laid out here:
Trying to be a good VPS neighbor

[Carsafety]

Do you believe it was vbulletin causing the problems?

I have a single MySQL database and that is the one for the forum consuming almost 300MB of disk space. The forums are basically stock with no mods or hacks and I've pretty much adjusted all the setup options for minimum resource use.

Outside the forums, the other websites are primarily text pages with extremely modest needs.

[Mikalee]

I host a phpbb forum (youthontherock.com) on jag that has over 5000 users, though the activity has dropped quite a bit in the last 2 years, there used to be around 10,000 posts/day and usually 40-50 people online at a time (much less than yours). That said, it was hosted on a shared account at the time with no problems. I did end up upgrading to the SDX plan a few months ago since the site seemed to be lagging, and it was a huge improvement. So while I've never had as many concurrent users as you do, I think the SDX will be more than enough for you for a year if not longer at your current growth rate.

[Doug Nelson]

vBulletin is known as one of the most efficient and secure php/mysql forums available. That said, any php app, and especially mysql apps, will use more resources than static pages.

While on the SDX plan I'd had as many as 1100 users on at one time. However, usage dropped over the next year, and at the time my troubles started I had fewer than 200 users on.

They did shut down my site, but in fairness I think there was a miscommunication. Upon contacting support, I was told I'd been warned twice before. Looking back at my support tickets I did see "you need to upgrade to a dedicated server". I took this as friendly advice, as it was missing the crucial "...or we will shut down your site", but I couldn't afford the dedicated server so I limped along.

I'm running vbulletin and photopost. At the time of the shutdown I was using vb3.0, but I asked them to turn my site back on so I could upgrade to the newest version in the hope that it would be more efficient. They did turn it back on, but the upgrades didn't seem to make any difference.

I was using a few mods, which might have contributed, but I hadn't made any modifications for 6 months before the shutdown. You'd think if they were the problem it would have shown up 6 months previously. Maybe it did, and they gave me 6 months slack in hopes things would get better, I do not know. Maybe it took that 6 months to fully populate my particular server with customers, I do not know that either.

[Carsafety]

Hm I would hate to move to a new provider only to be steered to a dedicated plan, which I have neither the time nor expertise to setup or manage.

I wonder if a "full" dedicated server is signifciantly better than shared hosting with similar limits? Sure, you have signifcantly fewer accounts sharing resources, but every one of those accounts is likely to be a resource hungry one. In a regular shared server, most accounts probably aren't big cpu/memory users... I'll have to look into SDX and other managed alternatives for a large vbulletin. We really don't get a lot of post volume (20k a month). Most of the concurrent users are visitors that browse a thread or two, best I can tell from the statistics.

It's just hard trying to convey to a provider what the requirements are when I don't have access to my current resource usage. I have a hunch that while I may be at the limit of a huge shared plan server that costs $50/year right now, the resources I need are not nearly as high as 250 users (based on Who's online over 15 minutes) on a stock Vbulletin might require.

[Vin DSL]

Hm I would hate to move to a new provider only to be steered to a dedicated plan, which I have neither the time nor expertise to setup or manage.

I wonder if a "full" dedicated server is significantly better than shared hosting with similar limits? Sure, you have significantly fewer accounts sharing resources, but every one of those accounts is likely to be a resource hungry one...

Yeah, I thought about that too - it's a compelling argument, but faulty...

Doesn't matter, dude! These SDX servers are brutes!

I know there's probably 20-30 other idiots on Kraken, just like me, that got kicked off regular servers at JagPC (and elsewhere) for using too many resources and/or crashing 100's of other web sites daily. Once again, doesn't matter!

I can "see" those other guys at work... for instance, load goes to 2.50 or whatever, then back down to 0.91, et cetera.

Here's the deal - the thing I'm trying to impress upon ppl...

Sometimes I'll go over to my web site - I've got 125k page views so far today - 600 visitors online (15 min average) half of them generating 404's 'cause they're trying to find non-existent files or whatever - hammering away at the MySQL server - all of this being logged into flat files, sql dbs, stat programs - and so forth, and so on. And guess what, the server load will be < 1.00

Hell, when I was on regular shared hosting, I used to watch the server load go to 60.00-125.00. I've never seen SDX go over 4.00 ...

I don't know you personally, but it sounds to me like you're into a typical buyer's scenario.

Carsafety, eh? Okay, here's a car analogy for you...

It's like you've found a 4x4 Hemi with a lift-kit & Monster Mudders. You're thinking about buying it, but you're not quit sure. So, now, instead of thinking of reasons to buy it, you're thinking about reasons why NOT to buy it.

This is the point where a sharp 'used car salesman' would ask, "What would it take to get you into this truck today?" or "What if I talk to the Sales Manager and get him to throw in some floor mats and a year's worth of free oil changes?"

The 'salesmen' here don't play that game, bro, but they will let you take it for a ride!

If I was you, I'd sign up for a SDX account and play around with it for 30 days. Maintain your old account over @ WTF Hosting for another month or two - mirror all your stuff over here - get it up n' running - then propagate the NS. If it doesn't meet your expectations, cancel the account and keep on truckin'...

Personally, I think you'll love SDX, but there's no way of knowing that until you drive it off the lot...

[Carsafety]

Personally, I think you'll love SDX, but there's no way of knowing that until you drive it off the lot...

Good point. The SDX is still in my top few contenders. I hope to get some more info from my current provider soon.