what size of web hosting space can i use for this project!

i have a project to design a site to bring over 10,000 students of a school together and every student would have a profile and a forum as big as this site (ozzu.com). please i wish to know what size of web hosting space would be okay for such site. will mysql database be ok to handle the database.

Many web hosts are offering 5 to 10 GB of disk space. So go for one. And if your site becomes successful as this site and your database increses, you can always buy more space.

You can find list of hosts offering packages of upto 10 GB at
http://www.web-hosting-world.com/top-10-web-hosts.php

You probaly don't need as much space as you think. Anything over 1 GB would probaly be enough. The thing you need to worry about is the data transfer limit (sometimes known as bandwidth) since it sounds like a lot of people will be accessing your website.

Hello dhoyin,

Space and bandwith really will be mostly irrelavant. You can certainly start with something in the 1-2GB disk space range and 10-20 GB bandwith -

However, what you really need to consider is # of simultaneous users - specifically on a data base driven site. This sort of requirement could easily require a dedicated server or more pretty quickly.

Hope this helps...

1-2GB space? Are you guys crazy?

To setup a forum only takes 15-25MB.

If the forum grows and starts hosting lots of pictures/videos it would be good to have the extra space. It's dirt cheap for that much space, so you may as well get it.

Dirt cheap could mean overselling for that type of spec. Maximum 300MB in my opinion. Thats alot of space there.

Hard drives are dirt cheap nowadays. It costs less than $1 for a GB.

Yes, but if it does get as big as he hopes, that SQL database is going to need space too.

I've one site that has a MySQL database of around 500Meg right now (and growing by about a meg daily), it soon builds up.

Even if your database only goes up by 250K/day, that's about 90-100Meg after a year (assuming you don't add a lot of content yourself initially to get the ball rolling - in which case it could be much larger).

To addto Axe's comments here - the OP mentioned and environment with a potential for 10,000 members - avatars, sig images, profile images, etc.... Really thinking about this - I dont think 1 gig will cut it...



please dont pass around info like that. If you want to speak actual costs (since we are talking about price for hosting here) - dont speak cost per GB in terms of actual cost of buying IDE hard drives from bestbuy or something - because this does not directly relate into cost per GB of storage to the consumer - nowhere even close...

Once you consider scsi, raid, local backup, off site backup, spare drives, etc etc etc - these costs escalate quite quickly - and this is just pure cost of disk space we are talking about here....

I think you guys missed an important part of the equation here. The TS has stated that each of the 10,000 students will have access to a forum the size of ozzu. That's a really tall order and much different than a single website with 10,000 members. A project of this magnitude would minimally require a high end dedicated server to start. Additionally a budget to add more servers at a moment's notice would be necessary. I'm sure ozzu is running on more than one server. Multiply that by 10,000 and then we get a clearer picture.

The only mitigating factor here are that it will take some time for each of the 10,000 students to build a forum the size of ozzu. Nevertheless I would start by deploying a dedicated server with a minimum:

Dual Xeon P4 2.8+
2GB+ RAM
Dual 73GB SCSI Drives

Plus a low end off site server for remote backups.

Regards,
Gus

I didn't miss any part of the equation. Even with 10,000 students, they'd all have to post 25 posts each on the first day of opening for it to be "the size of ozzu" - that's where your storage space comes in. Like you said though, that's the factor, how long will it take.

I have one site right now that gets more posts per month than Ozzu, but it's not "the size of ozzu" because it has about 100,000 posts LESS then Ozzu in the database.

That server sounds very familiar. ev1?

lol we don't have any servers at EV1. Nor do we any business with them. Those are merely the minimum specs I would launch this project with.

Ahhh, they have servers with almost identical specs.

I myself rent one from them that's the almost the same as you listed, pair of 73Gig Ultra-wide SCSIs, 2Gig RAM, except that it has a pair of Xeon 2Ghz processors.

Sounds like a nice little unit - now, I know nothing about these guys - are these white box towers?

Out of curiosity, what do they charge for these things?