I’ll be springing up a vBulletin board (how original!) soon and will probably go with a hosting site of 150mb. Nothing fancy, it will be automotive related. Which got me to thinking, just how much storage does the SDMB use (including software; vBulletin, MySQL, PHP and database usage)? How long would it take for 150mb to get eaten up with posts? It would be development for awhile anyway.
From previous MB teching experience, I’d guesstimate the size of the SDMB database at between 1 and 2 GB. That’s huge for any MB. Your 150 MB ought to last quite a while, really. A few hundred thousand longish posts, at any rate. One board I did extensive work for (which used different software, but the same type of MySQL DB) had upwards of 8,000 posts at the time the site owner closed down, and it’s DB was taking up something like 5 MB.
That’s a fraction of a kb per post. Seems pretty small for a longish post. Do they get compressed or something?
Well, by “longish” I meant on the order of 1,000 characters or so, which seems to be on the high side of the average post length.
Your first post to this thread is right around 1kb. Yeah, I guess that’s reasonable for longish. Still, a few hundred thousand seems like a lot, but I guess that’s good news. 
The vBulletin I administer has 8246 threads, 285521 posts, and 1943 members. We’ve been open for 2 years, and our DB is somewhere around 450 or 500 MB (I checked about a month ago).
150 will probably last you for the first 6 or 9 months, less if you become popular quickly. SDMB is really a bad place to compare to, since it is one of the largest (if not the largest) vBulletin powered board out there.
- Mike
Thanks for all the replies. I know the SDMB board is pretty big, but a gig or 2 is pretty good! When you think about it, the php code itself is pretty small, then all the rest is just plain text. I pictured a Compaq rack mount server with 40gb mirrored drives and four processors. Thanks again.
Note that your host may have different quota systems for flat files and database usage. For example, I once did work for a site that head a 10MB quota on a shared server, but there was never any quota on our MySQL DB. So when our content grew bigger than 10MB, rather than paying for more space, we just rewrote the site to pull everything from the DB.
Yeah, those guys were dumb.
But make sure your host will allow you enough DB storage to support the board.
If the whole SDMB takes up about 2 gigs couldn’t it be burned onto a DVD every few months as backup? I’m sure it could probably sell a few copies.