Ok, for a while there has been talk about me taking over the forums and moving them to my servers and software. There were two limitations to this idea which is why it hasn't been implemented yet.
The first limitation is our custom skin. We like it and we would like to keep it. Moving to a different forum software means re-skinning the new software for our look and feel. We have asked people in the past if they could put in a helping hand, and nobody has had time to help, which is totally fine, but it has kept us from moving forward.
The second limitation, which is really the topic that I would like to discuss, is databases. On my web host I am allowed 100 databases, but they can only be 100MB in size maximum. This limited space really is not sufficient to keep the forums working for long: maybe a year or two and then we will run out of space. So I went perusing around the interweb checking various hosting services trying to see if there might be a better solution (one that supports bigger databases and that still has all the other features we need). For the most part what I have is cheaper than anything out there for what is being offered as far as fully hosting the website goes. The idea came to me, however, that there is nothing that is requiring me to host the database on the site with my hosting service. The possibility exists for me to use an additional service that supplies strictly a database (one of the services I was looking at claimed unlimited databases, but I would have to do more research before I believed that entirely, it also didn't really say anything about size, only number of databases). The range I saw was something like $5-10 per month for just a database. Now that is minimal cost so it is no heartburn for me, but if I can avoid the extra cost I would like to. I also thought of another possibility: my dad has at his house a Windows Server 2003 server with a license for MSSQL. I thought perhaps it might be worth it to try hosting a forum (obviously it would be a test forum and not the real one to start) on my website and the database on Farmer's server. There are a couple of things here that need to be discussed.
Firstly is the connection speed. He has Cox's business service running to his house with 20MB down / 3MB up, so I don't *think* bandwidth should be an issue, but I would love for someone with experience in this matter to chime in here.
Secondly is latency. The application path would be: Browse to the forum, the forum connects to the remote database, the database returns the data and then the forum returns the page to the user. If the database server is local to the host server the latency is very minimal. If, however, as I am proposing to do, we make the database remote to the host server then this will introduce a good deal of latency. How much latency I'm not sure. Again, I would love for someone with experience to chime in here.
Thirdly is connection paths. With the host server and the database server all in the same server farm it is very unlikely for problems to occur with connections between the two servers. This is not true if the database server is remote. If either the connection to the host site *or* the database server connection went down then the forums would be unusable. Also if Farmer's server goes down (the power goes out there) then the forums are unusable. There is only a minimal UPS on it (though that could be changed out for something larger), but if the power outage lasts too long or if the local Cox switch goes down then we are out of luck. Also, if the server crashes or dies then again we are in trouble, there is no redundancy. You get the point.
Fourthly is quotas. I currently have a 3TB / month quota on my hosting service, of which I use about 150MB / month. I don't know if having all that traffic between the database server and the host server would overrun that. Also, so far we haven't been able to discover a quota on Farmer's internet service, but that doesn't mean one doesn't exist, ISPs tend to hide some of these figures to make their service seem more lucrative. One other thing that would need to be brought into this equation is that Farmer is also hosting a TS server on his server, so the combined transfer volume between the TS server and the database server might be an issue.
Fifthly is security. Farmer has a very good firewall at his place (Sofaware Safe@Office 500w), and he also has a second static IP address available if that would be better. Obviously setting up the firewall (if we use it) correctly and setting up security on the server itself would be very important. Any assistance with this (assuming we move forward with this, even for testing purposes) would be very much appreciated.
Obviously in an ideal world someone would offer cheap hosting services with a large database size, and if anyone knows of such a service I would love to hear about it, but I am trying to do the best with what is in front of me. I would love to discuss this in some detail and please if you have any experience in these kinds of matters *please* take a moment to lend your two cents. I'm sure there are pitfalls that I haven't thought about so if you can think of any other weaknesses or if you can think of a better way to do this I would *love* to hear your ideas.
Anyway, I have rambled on for long enough, have at it.
Indian not lost, tepee lost.