I'm currently hosting my site with host monster which gives you 300 gigs of storage and 3000gigs of bandwidth. I'm curious as to on average how many hits I would need a day before it makes sense to go with a dedicated server. We currently run a forum, and have recently add the a video content section which allows users to upload videos, pictures, etc. We are playing with the idea of opening a second account only for the "user content" of our site. So does it make sense to have two account on host monster or should we just go with a dedicated server?

Dude, if your plan offers 300 GB of storage and 3 terabytes of bandwidth, you're probably already on one. If it's a shared hosting account that you're on, there can't be that many others on the server.

Its shared hosting on hostmonster.com So you think that having two accounts (one for forums and one for video) would be more then enough? I mean until we surpass about 10,000 uniques a day?

Look at your current transfer. If you surpass 2000 GB, buy a second account. It's quite useless to do it before that.

Having two account does make sense. I'm managing a Movie Trailer download site too, which has two similar accounts for the downloads and one dedicated server for the text content. It's up to you what to do however.

Speaking from the host's perspective, 99% of the time the real killer is system resources (memory, CPU, drive read times), not bandwidth or disk space. A single server can push 1000Mbps (about 336,000GB/month) all day if it has the horsepower to do it (albeit at a cost).

If you're within your disk/bw allocations, the only real problem you might see is a slow-down if system resources are oversold (even if it's only your website that's taking them up). Very big sites eventually need to move to dedicated, and finally server clusters, but if you're not having any performance problems, there's really no good reason not to milk your host's shared hosting package for all it's worth.. go ahead and be that margin that they've just accepted losing money on.

Once you hit 1,000 unique visitors per day I highly recommend you get your own dedicated server.

I think there are two things here:

1. Do you have the budget to take a dedicated server?
2. Would it work out better for you to have downtime/disruption of an upgrade/migration etc. at this stage rather than when your site is even bigger/busier?

Without any indication of what you're currently paying it's a little difficult to advise, but as Adam said you've probably got a good chunk of a dedicated server already at those limits. This is good for you at the moment since you're probably getting a lot more than you're paying for, but I can imagine that your host will look to move you onto a bigger account if they're losing money on you (which is likely).

As Corey mentioned, it's generally the system resources rather than storage space usage that are the issue. However, if you're using a lot of bandwidth then in most cases there's a reasonable amount of processing involved as well (e.g. high MySQL usage, concurrent visitors etc.) which means your host may soon start waving their T&Cs at you from this angle.

I would suggest at a minimum you consider what your next step would be if you were to upgrade to something else in the near future - what could you afford, and who would be best to buy from etc.

As for whether or not you should take a dedi or a second shared plan... if the shared plan is cheap it may work out better value, but keep in mind that you may encounter some scripting difficulties if you're trying to manipulate the filesystem on one account/server from the other.

Sorry, collegec. I didn't see the part where you're with hostmonster.com. That plan is way too good to be true. I'm sure the hosts in here will correct me if I'm wrong, but a 500 GB hard drive would be around the $150 USD mark. Two of those (1 terabyte) in a RAID 0 configuration would be around $300 and would house 3 customers each, assuming the servers weren't overbooked.

If HostMonster put 3 of the $5.95 x 24-month plan customers on the server, the net revenue is $428.40 (which barely covers the cost of the hard drives, never mind the rest of the server.) Even if they put 3 $7.95 customers on the server over a 24-month period, it's only $572.40. So they're working off of a gross profit of at best $272.40, and that hasn't even taken into account the cost of the server, the cost of bandwidth, the cost of any software that may need to be installed, the tech support staff costs, the marketing costs, and any other costs I may have forgotten.

If I were you, I'd have a plan B host ready just in case and be ready to switch at the drop of a hat. This has all the earmarks of a "too good to be true" outfit.

I have the exact same plan. Hostmonster is one of the top rated hosts and I have never had a problem with them. You should go to their online instant chat and ask them directly. Every time I have a problem I just pop into that chat box on their site and they explain away, usually requiring no information from me (which saves time.)

When you are currenlty hosing more websites then your current server can get.

I am in the dedicated server club. O YEAH.

- S.J.

forums site is very sql intensive. And a forum with 200-400 active users will put the hostmonster shared hosting on the cpu usage limits and mysql connection limits.

you will waste lots of user in long terms. when its about 300 active users, switch to vps or dedicated server.

i love hostmonster as well

if it is shared, they must have resource usage limit, cpu & ram.. check that first..