Data/inode usage of a large xenForo forum

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SavvyShopper

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I am shopping around for hosting right now before I buy xenForo because there are still Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals going on. Shared hosting advertise "unlimited everything" which we all know is not true, but more importantly, I need to know the resource usages of a typical large forum.

For example, a forum with 500,000 users, 15 million posts, images allowed, and lets assume about 10,000 users visit/browse the site simultaneously.
What kind of resources would I expect to use based on those characteristics? So let me get this straight, each image or text document counts as an inode, and HostGator has a 100,000 inode limit for shared hosting. So a file can be any size and still count towards 1 inode, but then there is the disk space to consider (because shared hosting is not unlimited after all). Also, the number of simultaneous visitors would exceed certain daily bandwidth limits?
 
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rudymaddy said:
I have bought A2hosting on black friday 52% off. I will buy xenforo on wednesday.
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If that's a lifetime discount that will apply if you upgrade the VPS then that's not bad.
For $84 a month I get a dual Xeon L5639, 24GB RAM, 2 1TB HD's (software RAID 1) and 30TB of transfer a month.
My dual L5520's with same specs (except one of them I have has 17 IP's for it - it's designed to server VPS's) I'm paying $80 a month for each.
These are unmanaged (I don't need anyone to do any of the management stuff since I'm familiar with it). They also offer management services where I host at but not sure what they charge.
 
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Tracy Perry said:
If that's a lifetime discount that will apply if you upgrade the VPS then that's not bad.
For $84 a month I get a dual Xeon L5639, 24GB RAM, 2 1TB HD's (software RAID 1) and 30TB of transfer a month.
My dual L5520's with same specs (except one of them I has 17 IP's for it - it's designed to server VPS's) I'm paying $80 a month for each.
These are unmanaged (I don't need anyone to do any of the management stuff since I'm familiar with it). They also offer management services where I host at but not sure what they charge.
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which hosting is this?
 
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SavvyShopper said:
I am shopping around for hosting right now before I buy xenForo because there are still Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals going on. Shared hosting advertise "unlimited everything" which we all know is not true, but more importantly, I need to know the resource usages of a typical large forum.

For example, a forum with 500,000 users, 15 million posts, images allowed, and lets assume about 10,000 users visit/browse the site simultaneously.
What kind of resources would I expect to use based on those characteristics? So let me get this straight, each image or text document counts as an inode, and HostGator has a 100,000 inode limit for shared hosting. So a file can be any size and still count towards 1 inode, but then there is the disk space to consider (because shared hosting is not unlimited after all). Also, the number of simultaneous visitors would exceed certain daily bandwidth limits?
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You definitely need a dedicated server or cloud hosting
 
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Ok thanks HWS, Teapot, and Claudio. Everyone recommends shared hosting to start off cheaply, and then upgrade as things progress. But I'm wondering how much shared hosting can handle before I make the switch/upgrade to the more costlier dedicated servers. I mean, how many users/posts until I reach the point where I need to upgrade from shared hosting?
 
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Depends on the forum, the demographic, and everything else. You'll know when you're getting too big for your hosting, everything will be really slow and you'll potentially start getting complaints from your host, as well as errors and things.

Is the data you specified in the original post your site's actual size, or theoretical data? If the latter, how big is your site? It's true that you should start small, but 15M posts is not small...
 
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Teapot said:
Depends on the forum, the demographic, and everything else. You'll know when you're getting too big for your hosting, everything will be really slow and you'll potentially start getting complaints from your host, as well as errors and things.

Is the data you specified in the original post your site's actual size, or theoretical data? If the latter, how big is your site? It's true that you should start small, but 15M posts is not small...
Click to expand...

Actually, those are some realistic numbers from some deal sites/forums that I have looked at.

I am still doing my research. I am looking into starting a deals site/forum. But from what I read on HostGator's FAQs, forum posts are just data entries and do not count towards inodes? So besides images and the forum software files, what will take up inodes? What kinds of problems do I expect from 15 million posts? Surely, that must take up some disk space? I have seen some forums "archive" posts so does that reduce the filesize?
 
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Well, what you're actually saying is that you're starting a forum, so you're asking questions you don't need to for ages yet, to be honest. ^^;

Don't worry about the inode problem, 100,000 inodes is loads. The database resides in a comparatively small number of inodes - database experts will probably correct me, but I believe InnoDB databases (the default and recommended option) only take up one or two per table - so 35-40 max. Then it's one per file, more or less. You'll never reach the limit while you still need shared hosting.

Regarding archiving: XenForo does not archive posts - it doesn't need to and it causes more problems than it solves, from what I'm told. But as mentioned before, it makes no difference. As for file size, the whole database won't take more than a few gigs even when it's huge. Our 175,000 post, 50,000 members, heavily-modded database (with plenty of extra data) takes just over a gigabyte. And at this stage, we're actually on a dedicated server, although we need it more for the custom application.

Simple answer: Don't worry. Just start your forum, the hosting you talk about is absolutely fine. You can deal with problems as they come, and upgrading your hosting is going to be an integral part of that experience. There's literally no point in worrying about problems you might not see for a couple of years or more right now. Focus on getting your site started, off the ground, and relevant to your potential visitors. You can deal with having a 15M post forum when you actually have one to deal with
 
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