Howdy all! I’m hoping I can get some advice from the other webmasters out there.
I run a fairly busy forum site that usually has between around 30 and 50 people online at a time. The database is large too, with almost 500,000 posts and about 1200 users. The load on the server is starting to choke my current host, which is a “Private Server” where I get 5% of the P4 processor (I forget the exact speed) and 128 megs of RAM. I do about 30 gigs of traffic per month, and I need about 2 gigs of space for the site, forum, and online backups. I’m paying $50 a month now.
I posted my requirements over on webhostingtalk.com (great site btw) and I’m receiving a flood of offers.
However, I think a lot of people aren’t realizing what kind of load a busy forum puts on a server. I’ve had quite a few offers on shared servers, each of which swear that they can handle the traffic.
One person I’m talking to offered me a spot on a shared server for only $40 a month (less than I’m paying now!). I asked him what the load was on the server, and he copy and pasted the loads for the last 2 weeks. They were 0.0 everyday. Sounds good so far right? So I asked him what happens when I have a few more neighbors on the server and the load gets too high. He responded that “if the load does get higher, we will stop adding clients to the server you are on. We dont overcrowd our servers.”
Can this even be possible? The server is a P4 2.4Ghz with 1.5GB of RAM. If he’s being straight with me, if my site sucks up a good chunk of the processing power and memory, I’d be ostensibly getting a semi-dedicated server for almost nothing. It just doesn’t seem like he could afford that.
So is this too good to be true? I’ve already learned long ago to be wary of these hosting deals. (unlimited transfer, my ass cihost!)
Anyway, any advice would be greatly appreciated. Does it sound like I need a semi-dedicated or dedicated server for sure? Am I being too skeptical about these shared folks? Thanks a lot for any tips you can give me. 
- Chris S