Sunbirn (11.10.2005)

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Just out of curiosity - why did you choose to run Instantforum and not phpBB, which it seems everyone else is running - or even aspBB, if the programminglanguage is the problem ?

It would seem that going with tried and tested software would be more secure than doing something that I, at least (can't really speak for anyone else), never heard of ? (not saying its a bad thing - just curious)

And what about capacity? I've seen previous free forum-hosts get ultra-slow and/or have weeks of downtime to "increase capacity" - do you have a plan for high loads, I mean, I know its a free host and all, but questions are good

Hello Sunbirn,

welcome to forum-king and thanks for your questions.

For us it was important to use a forum that is a) professional coded and b) running on a MS-SQL-Server in combination with ASP.NET to get the most performance out of it with the lowest possible costs of ownership. This mainly because we already have MS-SQL-Server in our hosting-services and pretty much know how to handle it.

The second - and almost the biggest reason - not to use phpbb is that this is one of the most insecure forum-software available out there. The third thing is, that phpbb is becoming very slow when it comes to high loads. We decided not to use it because we want your service running, and not being down every 2nd day for a security update.

Well, the capacity... It´s hard for us to estimate the amount of traffic this service will produce in the next few months. To give you some numbers, we are at around 10 new forums every day and we are still on one webserver without seeing the cpu-load above 5% - so we are fine at the moment...

We pretty much know exactly how much load a single forum applies to the Webserver, and we know how much load the SQL-Databases will produce when running. We think we also know when the time has come to install a new hardware or extend the existing hardware - we did scenarios for that, and we are also sure that we can keep - if any - downtimes as low as possible for our customers.

We also created the forum installer that way, that new updates will be automatically installed to your forum, when there are patches available (fx. when a seriuos security bug is found).

I hope that helps!

Regards

*********************************************
Techman

S. Gester
www.gsg-media.de
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since this is a service for free, we will provide a rudimentary backup-service (primarily for us) and we will provide a possibility to restore backups. This is for the whole web and the database of your forum, not for single Topics. Each restore will be charged with 15€.

Hope that helps.

*********************************************
Techman

S. Gester
www.gsg-media.de
*********************************************