Internet forums are of two types. Flat and Threaded. In Flat forums, messages are posted at the bottom of the discussion and are on the same topic. Where as in Threaded forums, each message must be specified when replying to a previous message, allowing multiple discussion threads to evolve from a single initial discussion item. Ok, that was some basic stuff about Internet Forums. Let’s now look at some factors that should be considered when looking for a web hosting company to host your forum.
There are many Internet forum softwares currently available in the market. Most of them runs on PHP and are GPL license based. The underlying factors that are mentioned below will remain the same for any forum software you prefer to use.
- Number of users – A forum can have hundreds of users based on its age and popularity but you should be focusing on number of concurrent users. It simply means to take into account the maximum numbers of users, on an average, who are connected to your site. Your forum could have 1000 users but at any given point of time, only 20-30 users could remain connected to your site.
- Number of searches – Many forum owners either overlook or don’t even know that a single search can consume lot of resources. If a forum has hundreds of posts, a simple text search which runs through all the posts looking for a text phrase can require considerable amount of resources on the servers. Multiple searches at the same time can really slow down any forum. One should try to optimize the search queries or add time delay when a search is performed.
- Number of connections to the database is an another important factor. You could have 300 users browsing your forum but only 30-50 simultaneous database connections could be in use. The more the number of database connections, the higher will be requirement of CPU and Memory.
Those were some of the factors with respect to the forum software. Let’s now look at what should be on your list of requirements when you approach a host.
- Uptime – It’s one crucial factor that you should never overlook. When a forum is new, there could be many potential users coming to your site and frequent downtime could send them away from your forum. Dig down into the uptime record of the hosting provider before you contact them or ask them to provide you with some data on their uptime.
- Resources on Server – A forum, when it’s new, may not have lot of users. So, you can safely start your forum on a shared hosting account. But do not forget to check with the hosting provider for the current utilization of resources on the server your forum may be hosted on. If the server is oversold, chances are bright that your forum site will be slow to access. That’s another reason for visitors to go away from your site.
- Backup of forum – A forum can quickly grow up and have hundreds of posts. A hard disk failure and no back up can result in loss of all those posts. Please insist on reading the backup policy of the hosting company you approach. Carefully read their uptime and backup restore policy. Always have upto date backup of your entire forum to be able to restore your forum as soon as possible.
- Bandwidth – You may not need lot of disk space to host your forum but may need lot of bandwidth for the number of users on your site. Buy a hosting package with adequate bandwidth and also find out before hand the charges of additional bandwidth that you may want to purchase, if needed in furture.
A forum can be hosted on a shared hosting account provided the server has enough resources to handle the surge when you receive lot of traffic for certain duration. If your forum has more than 50-60 concurrent database connections and more than 500 simultaneous users, prefer to host it on a VPS (Virtual Private Server). And when your forum becomes massive, only then look for hosting it on a dedicated server.
I hope this post will be of some use to you in handling the hosting requirements of your forum. Please post your feedback in the comments section below.