How much disk space / bandwith do you need for your average forum?

I'm trying my hand at self-hosting and I found a free piggyback option that offers 15GB of diskspace and 100GB/month of bandwith. Sounds as good as it gets, especially in comparison to other options, but do you think it's enough once my forum hopefully grows? I'm not expecting anything huge, but, well, having some activity is the point of having a board. Should I be ready to look for an alternative, or is that enough to run a board in the medium term? Not sure how much is "too little" and "enough", so I am asking you more experienced fellows.

 

That should hold you for a good while. One thing that will help is not allowing folks to upload images. Set this so they can only use URLs instead. Doing this will save the disk space.

 

I also just started hosting myself (using GoDaddy). I have the Gen4 VPS Linux 2 CPU server with 100GB of space. Most of the time we run at 20-40% capacity (our site has been up for nearly 6 years now). This is normally fine, but sometimes if the bots get a bit crazy it can tank the site when they start eating up the bandwidth.

I'd recommend adding cloudflare or something similar so you can monitor where your traffic is coming from and shut it down if needed (even the free cloudflare plan lets you put your site into attack mode which can be super useful).

 

I know this topic is really old but, I don't think you will need anything more than 2MB to start off with. Surprisingly forums don't actually take up a lot of space on a sever considering it's primarily just text that is being inserted into the database. When you start uploading things like movies, videos, music and images is when you need to worry about bandwidth and those type of things.

 

I second this. The forum software I use, SMF, barely eats 10 MB, and that's with all the extras that I have installed. The database, is really optimized too. In fact, with everything I have on my site, images, downloads, audio files, even videos, and the various attachments within the forum itself, and including all the extra software such as MediaWiki, I'm using only like 7 GB of my hosted plan's 100 GB total.

And when I did self host, running a LAMP server (Linux Apache MySQL, PHP) I didn't care about disk quotas or data transfer limits, because everything was on my own hard drive. It cost me an additional $20 per month for the Static IP address from my ISP. Running a forum, even a wiki doesn't need a super expensive monthly ISP plan either, unless you're hosing video related stuff, but a text/image based forum, you could probably go with a cheap option for like $35 to $50 / month. Currently, I'm paying $115 / month, but I have Gigabit speed internet, only because I'm impatient and I tend to do a lot of downloading of massive software packages, like Unreal Engine, Visual Studio, etc... and of course, there's my anime obsession, but we won't get into that.