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Server Beefyness question

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DrVal

Limp Gawd
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Jul 17, 2006
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How beefy of a setup would you need to host a forum site on par with WOW's official forums? (using vBulliten if it matters).

Basically looking for a guess at a general cost assuming you had the housing, racks, cooling system, everything, just needed to slide the suckers into place, set em up, and flip the switch. Just asking here because I assume there are a lot of professionals that browse these forums that probably have done just what I am questioning.
 
Well the official WoW forums aren't running on vBulletin, they are running a different setup... probably based on a custom build of FuseTalk or an entirely custom written setup. So a direct comparison on how vBulletin would handle it is hard to say.

Short of FuseTalk and it's gloriously high pricetag, vBulletin 3.x is probably the best (pay) software for any online community, large or small. vBulletin will handle several hundred simultaneous users on even a mediocre server (P4 2ghz/512MB or Athlon 2500+/512MB), but that depends on having a properly setup and optimized PHP/MySQL configuration. Not only that but it also depends heavily on having your storage configured correctly - several thousand MySQL queries at once will slow even the fastest server to a creep if you're running the database on an IDE device in PIO mode or something. There are so many variables besides just the hardware that it's really hard to give your answer conretely. A bad software combination will make even the best hardware useless - We've seen the effects of a bad software combination here at [H]ardForums here recently (no insult intended to Kyle and Cliff, they've been working their ASSES off trying to get things running right).

Take what I say with a grain of salt though, I am a loyal vBulletin user and have been for 8 years now. I've probably got $2k tied up in vBulletin licenses. :D
 
IBTL with my opinion.

5 years vB admin on my third license.
vBulletin can certainly handle alot of load, offtopic.com which has [Threads: 3,279,636, Posts: 79,756,732, Members: 171,753] is running vBulletin.

As for how big a server to handle it, you should be looking at atleast two servers, one server running the php/html and another for the database, the servers as big as your wallet allows.
 
besides for hardware you need a "beefy" internet connection as well, probably T1 or greater
 
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