On Forums

So, Elliquiy's Ajax Chat finally got the better of it, size wise, and nearly brought down the server while I watched. You might ask why I'm running what amounts to IRC on the web and I will probably respond to that in some future article. E's silliness is beside the point, here.

I've been discussing server specifications with my webhost, going over hard drives, RAID configurations, and so on, eventually expressing a desire for a battery-backed cache unit and asking about RAID 6.

So, the salesman responded:

High Performance Communities: Choosing a Software Stack

So, your forum needs a new home. You buy a cheap dedicated server with a few frills - RAID 1 keeps you warm at night - and plan to setup shop. If you went the way of the VPS world, you might be more familiar with one form of server or another, but all that does is push the decision earlier. You need a server, you need it soon, and you need to know what it's going to run.

The term 'software stack' does not refer to your community script (vBulletin, phpBB, Mediawiki, Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla...), but rather the software configuration that powers it - Operating System, Webserver, Database, and Language. The software tends to decide issues of language and database, so I'll be glossing over the former two here, instead.

Although it might not seem obvious at first, moving to a dedicated server for most sites actually involves a reduction in peak capacity. Quality web hosts usually host their sites on high-end servers - eight or more cores, triply mirrored RAID 10 arrays, and high quality monitoring, redundant power supplies and so on. Your first dedicated server is hardly going to be so lavish - you are paying for consistency and freedom. Thus, it can make sense to stick with virtual private servers (VPSes) and high end shared hosting for a time.

A lot of advice I see given to forum and community owners is to 'move to a VPS', as if this is an intrinsically superior option to any shared hosting plan. In some cases a VPS can be the logical step, for a variety of reasons, but it is not intrinsically superior.

This article is the first in a series for community owners who have outgrown a VPS or a larger shared hosting environment, and need their own server to handle similar load levels without running into bottlenecks, but want advice about what they need, from someone who has been there. Since both of my major communities are adult, I created this site in part to serve as a decidedly non-adult repository for presenting what I have learned.

For my own experience, I run two of the most active communities on the Internet - Elliquiy Adult Roleplaying Forums and the Blue Moon Sexual Role Playing Forum. The splash page of each forum does not involve anything racy, but the images and text inside of said forums might not be so gentle on the pure of mind - be forewarned.

As you take up more and more of your host's resources on a machine - whether high-end VPS or high-end shared - you are going to consume more and more of its I/O bandwidth. On a good host, this will typically be higher than what your first dedicated server would be - however, you are at the mercy of everyone else on the machine. And you will notice, repeatedly. When you or your host get fed up with this, it's time to move to a dedicated machine.

It always gets me a bit - naming your website after your own name or common handle. In this case though, it sort of makes sense.

Since the welcome page is apt to change over time, I will go over my goals for this site here.

First and foremost, I want to put my technical articles here - about securing Windows, optimizing Debian, hacking Simple Machines Forum, whatever. In addition to being an adult forum, Elliquiy is rather large, and placing it there only makes it all the more intimidating if people ever come to Elliquiy for that sort of thing.

Secondly, well, an idea came to me after Personal Roleplaying was proposed. Elliquiy runs on Simple Machines Forum, and is currently one of the largest and most active of such forums. Blue Moon runs on phpBB, due to it being more familiar for its client base, and has likewise become quite sizable. I'm hoping that, with MyBB, Personal Roleplaying will also be rather active, and I can analyze a multitude of forum software in a fairly objective manner.

I'm not stopping with those three, of course. The forums here are open for anyone to join, and I have two additional projects that I want to apply PunBB and Vanilla to. My extensive experience with SMF probably biases me a bit, but I do want to look at them all through an objective lens.

I can't guarantee I will look at everything, of course. Drupal implies giving Joomla another chance (I tried... I really did try), as well as Wordpress/BBPress, in order to compare it with more fully fledged CMS solutions.

We'll see what people want, I suppose : )