Can you suggest a host?

[Pedja]

Time has come. I've got information from Andrew that one of my sites takes up significant resources and that it cannot be hosted on my Dathorn account. So, I have to move. One solution is just to take another Dathorn account and move site there, other is to find some other host.

Problem is that site is noncommercial - it makes no money it is just an small forum of a local community, so hosting should not cost much.

Can you suggest some hosting service that could do the job? I do not need reseller account, plain hosting that would run SMF forum would be just right.

[justme]

Have you thought of asking for donations from the forum community to help with costs? If it gets enough traffic to cause a resource problem then certainly there would be enough folks willing to chip in to help pay the expenses.

[Grunfeld]

Great idea, also you may want to consider ( maybe you are currently) running a banner ad in the top of each page.... to some advertisers..

Have you thought of asking for donations from the forum community to help with costs? If it gets enough traffic to cause a resource problem then certainly there would be enough folks willing to chip in to help pay the expenses.

[cathode]

I sure would love to know where this acceptable / have to move threshold is... Is it a bandwidth issue? It is a CPU or memory hog issue? These things need to be defined for all of our benefits.

[AndrewT]

Things like this are generally related to PHP/SQL usage, concurrent forum users, etc. There is no way to really define these limits as it varies greatly per software, hack, addon, etc. etc.

[ZYV]

I would suggest you buying a cheap Virtuozzo-based VPS solution. A friend of mine currently has one from Keyweb.de (and I host some dedicated servers there). It's real cheapo, although the support is few to none. However I don't remember any bandwidth/hardware problems with their cluster over the past few years, so if you are skilled Linux administrator this is great value for money!

The good thing about VPS is that when you begin to exceed the ressources it will slow down, but since you have a fixed quota of everything you are not going to get banned. And you have the total control over the host, so you may replace Apache with nginx, mySQL with pg and so on to save valuable ressources.

Finally you can fully backup a VPS, so you have a one-button complete state recovery back to the latest checkpoint if something goes wrong/you get hacked etc.

Hope that helps.