Did you know its possible to host a site with a huge amount of daily visitors and posts for less than $20 a month! Yes and thats still with a fully managed shared hosting server. Of course that wont be possible if you have over 1 million posts, but it can still most likely keep you on a VPS.
There are a few key points that matter:
* Your bandwidth consumption
* The space your server uses
* Your mysql connections
How to reduce your bandwidth:
Bandwidth is the number of data your visitors transfer each time they visit your site. When a visitor loads a web page in your site, every data (images, downloaded files, texts) that is in that web page (and also in your server) costs you bandwidth. The more vistors you have makes you consume more bandwidth.
If you have a typical forum based site, you can expect your site to consume around 250 Gb. monthly consumption if you have around 10,000 daily visitors. This is wayyy too much! Here are the main things that consume bandwidth
Attachments: Attachments take up a huge amount of bandwidth! If you have a site that doesnt really need attachments, you should probably remove users permissions to use them.
Guests: Do you allow guests to lurk your site without registering? I wouldnt! Guests can be a huge reason your site takes up bandwidth also, they also take up mysql connections but youll read about them later. Dont let guests veiw all your sites images, or dont let them veiw any at all, and your bandwidth consumption will go way down.
Images: Okay I saved the best for last. Images are the BIGGEST reason your site takes up bandwidth! If you have a ton of styles uploaded to your server your likely to be taking up lots of bandwidth. Every image can take up over 200kb of bandwidth! Try using text instead of images, it will help alot!
Server Space:
If you are running a forum based site, your database will probably be the number one culprit of your server space eater. Especially if you have a large board, you"ll likely to have a large database as well. If your database (and other files in your server) takes much space in the server and exceeds the limits your hosting company set, you"ll be asked to move to a dedicated server so you must make sure your site does not occupy too much space if you want to stick with your cheap shared hosting package.
Attachments: Gee they are horrible huh, bandwidth and server space! Guess what, theyre probably the biggest way to lose server space. Remove em as said above, and you will do one of the biggest steps!
Custom Avatars: Theyre just like attachments, you upload them, dont let this happen! Get tons of avatars that you can choose, but NOT upload!
Posts: Do you have a spam zone where you let members make useless posts? Think again! Thats server space, bandwidth too! Its pointless, so dont do it.
Private Messaging: Prune private messages, they can pile up and take up server space so fast, dont keep them!
Mysql Connections:
Your shared hosts probably will only let you have 15 connections at a time. Thats every time a guest, spider, or user does anything that causes a page to reload. Thats right, GUESTS AND SPIDERS TOO! We cant deal with the spiders, but the guests are easy.
How to reduce guest lurking: Get a mod that allows you to block guests after viewing a certain amount of forums, they exist. If you dont, your server will get loads of connections and you will get an error whenever trying to refresh your page, along with this most hosts will make you move up to dedicated!
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