kudos and hosting...

Eliteoomph

Member
Hey guys,

I am a web designer and new to the forum world and had a few questions.

I wanted a little input in a few areas, the first being hosting. Right now i have a reseller account with justhost and everything works well. But, I hear for forum hosting if you are planning on having a lot of active users that a VPS or dedicated server is the way to go... I just wanted to get your thoughts on this. I would like to start off being able to handle 100 active users at any giving time is possible.

Another thing is member ranking will be very important in the site I am building. I was wondering if there is a kudos type system in place to help establish the more contributing members. Kudos would be fine or a star system like ebay has but does not have to be nearly that in depth... Really anything like that would work.

Thanks guys for you help and I am really exciting about building my first forum!
 
I like the Virtual Server L package at 1and1 and little less storage then the other around same price but about double the ram and double the bandwidth and 10 bux cheaper.... Why do others not like it?
 
I like the Virtual Server L package at 1and1 and little less storage then the other around same price but about double the ram and double the bandwidth and 10 bux cheaper.... Why do others not like it?

Depending where you live, people say the support sucks and in the past there were some payment issues.

But form my personal experiences of the last 8 years or so, I have not had a single problem with them,
 
I think I am going to go with 1and1... do you have a username of anything I can give them to tell them that you referred me? they might knock a little bit off of your bill. ;)
 
oh and one more question linux or windows server? what is the difference? the only thing I notice is windows is guaranteed 1GB of ram and linux is guaranteed .5GB ram but 2GB dynamic...
 
Honestly, if you don't know the difference between a linux or a windows server then you should not be paying for a VPS just yet. I don't mean that in any kind of dissing way but just stating the reality of things. Like I wrote in another post, most forum admins vastly overestimate the resources they will require for their forum. Unless you happen to run a pr0n or warez forum it will be a long road for a brand new forum to get to 100 active users at any one time.

While a forum admin can get away with knowing very little about how the operating systems work it is immensely beneficial if the admin knows a bit more about these things because it will vastly improve the ability to troubleshoot and optimize things.

Generally speaking PHP based scripts, such as Xenforo, do better on Linux hosts. Yes, you can run PHP on Windows but if you do you also want to install Apache and at that point there's very little reason to pay for the Windows license and put up with the memory overhead of Windows as opposed to the lower overhead of Linux.

My suggestion to you would be to purchase a carefully managed shared hosting plan that allows for shell access and comes with cPanel or a similar control panel to make your admin job easier. I personally like to plug Liquidweb.com VPS/Dedicated/Cloud XenForo Hosting Recommendation
and if this TinyMCE wouldn't suck so bad I could actually keep typing behind the link without to having to resort to creating a new line just to write some more text.

Anyway, I like to recommend Liquidweb because they do not oversubscribe their resources and you get good database performance even on shared hosting. I can definitely not recommend HostGator as I just recently tried their shared hosting plan and couldn't even install Xenforo, that's how slow the DB performance was.

Wherever you go, make sure they have a money back guarantee if you are not satisfied. A good measure to figure out whether shared hosting will work at that provider is whether you can install Xenforo without issues in the first place. If the provider sucks then the install will fail due to slow DB writes. That's a pretty sure sign to just pick a different provider rather than monkey with optimizing settings that shouldn't need to be optimized in the first place.
 
Honestly, if you don't know the difference between a linux or a windows server then you should not be paying for a VPS just yet. I don't mean that in any kind of dissing way but just stating the reality of things. Like I wrote in another post, most forum admins vastly overestimate the resources they will require for their forum. Unless you happen to run a pr0n or warez forum it will be a long road for a brand new forum to get to 100 active users at any one time.

While a forum admin can get away with knowing very little about how the operating systems work it is immensely beneficial if the admin knows a bit more about these things because it will vastly improve the ability to troubleshoot and optimize things.

Generally speaking PHP based scripts, such as Xenforo, do better on Linux hosts. Yes, you can run PHP on Windows but if you do you also want to install Apache and at that point there's very little reason to pay for the Windows license and put up with the memory overhead of Windows as opposed to the lower overhead of Linux.

My suggestion to you would be to purchase a carefully managed shared hosting plan that allows for shell access and comes with cPanel or a similar control panel to make your admin job easier. I personally like to plug Liquidweb.com VPS/Dedicated/Cloud XenForo Hosting Recommendation
and if this TinyMCE wouldn't suck so bad I could actually keep typing behind the link without to having to resort to creating a new line just to write some more text.

Anyway, I like to recommend Liquidweb because they do not oversubscribe their resources and you get good database performance even on shared hosting. I can definitely not recommend HostGator as I just recently tried their shared hosting plan and couldn't even install Xenforo, that's how slow the DB performance was.

Wherever you go, make sure they have a money back guarantee if you are not satisfied. A good measure to figure out whether shared hosting will work at that provider is whether you can install Xenforo without issues in the first place. If the provider sucks then the install will fail due to slow DB writes. That's a pretty sure sign to just pick a different provider rather than monkey with optimizing settings that shouldn't need to be optimized in the first place.
Thanks for the constructive criticism. But, to late :) already purchased. It is ok I don't mind paying a little more for a few months to see how things go. I can't really get into the details of my site although I can say it is not pr0n or warez but I do estimate there being a LOT of traffic due to the nature of the site. I have read about the nightmare's of sites getting shut down because of the cpu load getting to high and I simply can not risk that. If that means I have to pay 20 bux more a month to insure that then so be it.

We will see how it goes I guess...
 
Generally speaking PHP based scripts, such as Xenforo, do better on Linux hosts. Yes, you can run PHP on Windows but if you do you also want to install Apache and at that point there's very little reason to pay for the Windows license and put up with the memory overhead of Windows as opposed to the lower overhead of Linux.

I'm not sure anyone would run Apache on Windows. PHP + IIS/Windows is just as good, if not better than PHP + Apache/Linux.
 
I'm not sure anyone would run Apache on Windows. PHP + IIS/Windows is just as good, if not better than PHP + Apache/Linux.
I do. Call me old fashion but Apache has always treated me right. It wasn't a matter of buying a windows license, I was using windows for the server for other reasons, and I decided to turn off IIS and install Apache...
 
I do. Call me old fashion but Apache has always treated me right. It wasn't a matter of buying a windows license, I was using windows for the server for other reasons, and I decided to turn off IIS and install Apache...

Have you tried IIS recently, that is 7+?
 
I'm not sure anyone would run Apache on Windows. PHP + IIS/Windows is just as good, if not better than PHP + Apache/Linux.
Do you have some actual recent stats to back up that PHP runs better on IIS than it does on Apache under Linux?
I am just asking because the Internet is full of anecdotes to the contrary especially once one gets into higher CPU loads.
 
I'm not sure anyone would run Apache on Windows. PHP + IIS/Windows is just as good, if not better than PHP + Apache/Linux.
All my experience working in IT as a professional has said otherwise (And I deal with both setups quite often).

If you can show otherwise, please make sure that the benchmarks aren't weighted towards one platform or the other (All of the ones I've seen have clearly had more tuning done to the Windows install than was done to the Linux install).
 
I have read about IIS7 with FastCGI and significant tuning being quite decent for PHP and I personally would love to see PHP perform well on Windows just because I love love love RDP but likewise I have also seen the same articles mentioning that once the CPU load increases the performance really takes a dive whether it's tuned or not.

Would be interesting to know whether any of the larger forums run on Windows.
 
I have read about IIS7 with FastCGI and significant tuning being quite decent for PHP and I personally would love to see PHP perform well on Windows just because I love love love RDP but likewise I have also seen the same articles mentioning that once the CPU load increases the performance really takes a dive whether it's tuned or not.

Would be interesting to know whether any of the larger forums run on Windows.
Its possible to get Windows to run PHP well under IIS7, the thing is it requires a lot more tuning than if you ran Apache on Linux.

All the benchmarks I have seen have tuned Windows, leaving Apache/Linux default, and the one that did tune them both used completely different setups for each server that made the results laughable.
 
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