How much bandwidth is needed to run a forum?

Jason76

Madly Diligent
Joined
Nov 27, 2016
Messages
7,211
Reaction score
960
FP$
576
How about 20 GB for a new forum which has a few icons on it? Does it need more? Obviously, a VPS or server is the best solution, but how can it run decently on shared hosting?
 
Well, using a CDN such as CloudFlare can cut down on spammers and reduce your bandwidth usage. Another solution would be hosting your images on another server built for storage and bandwidth.

But 20GB for a forum is rather high unless it's popular. Perhaps, try a more efficient software? 😀 Or cut down on the spam visits?
 
Well, using a CDN such as CloudFlare can cut down on spammers and reduce your bandwidth usage. Another solution would be hosting your images on another server built for storage and bandwidth.

But 20GB for a forum is rather high unless it's popular. Perhaps, try a more efficient software? 😀 Or cut down on the spam visits?

With WordPress, it works great, but it seems like a certain new MyBB forum is slow. I'm suspecting the design is bogging it down, not the hosting. Anyway, 20 GB seems like a lot but I think it's a gimmick to beat the competition. 😉
 
I don't know if 20GB is too much for a forum though, especially if you're getting a lot of hits. You could try blocking Yandex and Baidu, as those are crawlers that you do not need and can use a lot of bandwidth.
 
If it's the design, it's most likely the images you are using. 😀 One more thing I forgot to mention yesterday was hot-linking. You might want to see if other websites are hot-linking your images. High bandwidth is a sign of that.
 
I would say 20GB is good enough for a start up forum. But I would also recommend going for a virtual private server rather than a shared hosting service.
 
I would say 20GB is good enough for a start up forum. But I would also recommend going for a virtual private server rather than a shared hosting service.

How about WordPress? Would you say the same? I don't think it needs as much power, usually.
 
My forum has used 2Gb of bandwidth over the past month. That being said avatars, headers, and image uploads are handed by Imgur rather than my server so bandwidth is way less.
 
20GB is good enough for a startup forum, you should 3Gb of bandwidth.
You should use OVH VPS, Vultr, Linode, DigitalOcean, RamNode, Dediserve!
 
Back
Top Bottom