Forum Moderators: phranque
I want to host several phpbb forums (ONLY phpbb forums) and I found a managed VPS host with the following specifications:
Starter 200GB VPS
Equal share CPU
256MB Burst RAM
5GB RAID1 Storage
Root Access 2 IP Addresses*
128MB RAM guaranteed
200GB Monthly Transfer
Unlimited domains Hardware: DELL PowerEdge
Dual 3.06Ghz Processors
4-12GB Ram Per server
Included Applications
AWstats 6.4
Apache mod_perl 1.99_12
Fedora Core 1 Development Tools p4
Mailman, the GNU Mailing List Manager 2.1.5
My Control Panel
MySQL server 3.23.58
Open WebMail 2.50
PHP (Fedora Core 1) 4.3.8
ProFTP server 1.2.10
SSH
SSL for Apache 2.0.50
Secure FrontPage Apache Server Extensions 5.0.2.2635
SpamAssassin 2.63
System Administrator Control Panel
UW IMAP and POP3 servers 2002d-3
Workgroup Administrator Control Panel
ZendOptimizer 2.1.0b
Now, they told me that they can upgrade or install whatever applications I want. I do want the best of the best to run my boards (not too busy now). If it were you, what would you ask your host to install/upgrade/ask. Please include version of software....
Please choose the best and tell it to me straight I don't mind. More than one advice will be greatly appreciated.
Looking at the list, the biggest thing that stands out is that you appear to have been offered Fedora Core 1, which is pretty old these days. I believe it is still supported by the Fedora Legacy project, but security updates come from the legacy project not the main Fedora team. Fedora has moved on to Core 4 now, although Core 3 is still supported. RHEL or Centos would be even better options (athough RHEL is expensive), or a FreeBSD setup would be good too.
When running phpBB, you need a fully up-to-date version of PHP4 - you need to check to find out whether the PHP 4.3.8 has had security patches backported. If not, you must move on to 4.3.11 or (better) 4.4.0. Other than that, your PHP should be compiled to support gzip compression (and you should activate the option in the phpBB control panel) - this will save you a ton of bandwidth for very little processor overhead.
For the rest, as long as everything is properly patched, there's no problem that I can see. Without knowing the number or size of your forums, it is impossible to estimate whether the hardware is sufficient.
