Pprune Servers - Which ISP do you use for hosting?
 

I have been running a pilot of a website that was planned to be launched during Q1 next year, and the response has forced a rethink of our hosting plans.

It is unlikely that we will be able to get away hosting on free (& banner free) web-space sites once the full site is released, and I was wondering who Pprune uses to host their servers.

Although, seeing as Pprune experienced around 191Gb of data transfer during September, I think you are in a different league!

So, my questions are:

1. Who do you use (ISP) to host your servers? Can you recommend any UK hosting companies?
2. Do you use Virtual Web Hosting or do you own your own server(s)?
3. Either way, how much physical disk space do you use to run this site? (The forum on our site is likely to continue growing and the 'free, unlimited space' currently offered will no doubt be revoked at some point)
4. Have you ever compared UltimateBB (which is costly) against other Forum software like Snitz2000 (which is free)? Do UltimateBB offer a hosting service, as I can't find any info from their website.

Sorry for asking all these questions, however, I thought it may be worthwhile asking those who have been through this process already.

Many thanks

We use an ISP in the U.S. to host PPRuNe as historically bandwidth has been a lot cheaper in the U.S. Recently bandwidth has been coming down in price in the UK and we are currently rethinking this.

We have our own (leased) server. It's a twin-pentium machine with 512Mb RAM, 9Gb of disk and it runs a unix-based O/S. We use the Zeus webserver as it's the fastest around, is relatively easy to administer, support from Zeus is first-rate and it's highly secure.

If/when we move the website to the UK we'll have to buy our own server as very few UK ISPs actually have available anything that is powerful enough. ISPs require the hardware to be rackmounted so our new server will be expensive.

Currently we use somewhere between 4 and 5Gb of disk space. When we do software upgrades we do an on-disk backup before starting the work so that if things go wrong we can very quickly recover, hence I always make sure we have at least 3Gb free.

UltimateBB was cheap when PPRuNe started, it's been relatively reliable, is fairly easy to modify/fix but it isn't very efficient.

---Mik

[ 21 November 2001: Message edited by: PPRuNe Dispatcher ]

Have a look at ikonboard I`m sure this free BBS software will serve your needs.