Disk Storage and Bandwidth Requirement

[peterinwa]

Can anyone give me any idea of how much disk space and bandwidth might be required by a forum?

I have 15,000 visitors a day, but of course only a small portion of those would visit the forum.

I know it's a tough question because you don't know how many users will visit the forum, how often, how much they will read and how much they will post.

But perhaps someone can figure out some way to give me an idea per 1000 posts or whatever.?

Thanks, Peter

[kodaks]

It may be easier to give an estimate if we know the type of forum software you are using, because each can be a different bandwidth and space. Do you have an idea of what kind of software you will use?

[peterinwa]

I'm looking now (mostly at WowBB and as you suggested MyBB). But I'd think disk storage requirements would be based on simply the number of characters in the posts.?

[encyclo]

You've got to store not just the posts, but user details, private messages, avatars, signatures...

A very rough estimate for a phpBB forum (looking at one of mine) would be to expect a MySQL database size of 100 megabytes for a 500 members / 100,000 posts forum, plus a few megabytes for the avatars, installed files, etc. As most hosting companies offer at least 50 gigabytes for even a basic plan, storage space is not a big problem. Bandwidth is your biggest expense: make sure you have bucketloads if you have a popular forum. Again an extremely rough estimate, the above forum could get through 20 gigabytes a month transfer.

[peterinwa]

Thank you! That helps a lot.

Peter

[rogerd]

Bandwidth can be a biggie - and it's quite dependent on your forum design. I used a static-page forum on one site that didn't auto-break long forums or threads, and the bandwidth got into the hundreds of GB per month. Converting to a dynamic-page forum cut the bandwidth usage dramatically, even though the pages in the new forum were a bit "heavier".

Regardless of which forum you end up with, it's a good idea to search their forum for "reduce bandwidth" - you'll probably find a definitive thread on how to cut bandwidth for that software.