Thread

I’m a member of a large forum based website that uses vBulletin for it’s membership and forums.

The administrator is planning on shutting it down in the next few months, and I’m thinking of offering to take it over.

I’m a heck of a lot more familiar with EE, although only partially familiar with EE Forums, than I am with vBulletin.

Does anyone have experience with both? Pros and cons of EE Forums over vBulletin? He sites large bandwidth usage as one of the major concerns (25gb to 35gb a month). I know various blogs I’ve been involved with have seen much better bandwidth usage when moving from MT to EE - would vBulletin vs EE Forums be similar?

It could be set that “Forums are Forums.” They all work in a somewhat similar manner. Having used EE’s Forums since the introduction in 2005, and vBulletin since about the same time, I can give you a basic view of both. vBulletin has more bells and whistles; those little features that keep updates coming every so often, but that most users never figure out. EE’s Forums, while somewhat basic in the feature comparison list, provides comparable functionality, though the most important features is full integration into EE (including, as an option, the ability to run the EE Forums through EE’s template rendering engine).

So, vBulletin is very capable with many features. EE’s Forums is capable, with fewer features. Outside of that, bandwidth and server CPU will tend to be about the same (unless EE Forums runs through the template rendering engine). EE Forums does not allow for easy site design “skinning” as you will find with vBulletin, which has a whole cottage industry built to handle site themes.

A few questions you need to ask:

What do you gain by using EE and EE Forums (need both) vs. vBulletin? What do you lose (what do users lose) by switching to EE’s Forums?

Other questions: How many members would be impacted by a change? How easy will the change be for the administrator (vBulletin’s admin is far more complex than EE’s Forums). Is the site ad supported (running EE’s Forums in the template rendering engine makes it a breeze to drop in ads vs. vBulletin)?

I don’t see bandwidth as being much of an issue. Even PairLite, notoriously dependable, gives 50 gigs for as low as $8.25 a month; many other hosts are similar or even less expensive per month for comparable bandwidth.

Thank you for the response, and for the name of PairLite - not a company I’d come across before.

The current administrator says he has about 2 - 3k users, but only 2 - 4 hundred active, and only about 1 - 2 hundred active daily or regularly - this generates around 28 - 38gig of traffic, and his existing host forced him to a dedicated server, which bumped his cost.

It may be my limited forum software experience, but it struck me that this shouldn’t prove too much for EE Forums to handle, or handle in a way to force them to a dedicated server.

So, I’m thinking it is more likely to be his webhost. I use psek.com for my hosting, and they say they would have no problem, and it looks like Pairlite would be an option also.

Thanks for the feedback - I’d not move them to EE Forums immediately, but maybe some time down the line it’ll be a good way to go, if I even take it over.

Any such move should be done only when there’s a “compelling reason.” It’s hard to find one so far. The nature of forums means that content is usually not cached (unlike EE templates which have a sophisticated caching system to help reduce server load when a site gets busy) so hardware requirements will be somewhat greater—that holds true even for EE’s forums (slightly more so if the forums are run through the EE template rendering engine).

That does seem like a lot of bandwidth (and server CPU) considering the number of regular users. PSEK seems quite similar to Site5 and many other hosts. A busy site should not use the less expensive hosts, regardless of unlimited storage, and unlimited bandwidth bullet points.

Any such move should be done only when there’s a “compelling reason.” It’s hard to find one so far. The nature of forums means that content is usually not cached (unlike EE templates which have a sophisticated caching system to help reduce server load when a site gets busy) so hardware requirements will be somewhat greater—that holds true even for EE’s forums (slightly more so if the forums are run through the EE template rendering engine).

That does seem like a lot of bandwidth (and server CPU) considering the number of regular users. PSEK seems quite similar to Site5 and many other hosts. A busy site should not use the less expensive hosts, regardless of unlimited storage, and unlimited bandwidth bullet points.

Would PairLite be an option?

vBulletin defenitely has more features that the Forum module. I think you need to think if you really need all of those features? A lot of them you probably won’t use (of course a lot of people use them all, but it depends on what u want). I decided to migrate everything to the forum module a while back. Users did notice the difference and started asking about it, but they got used to it and no one really complains about the stuff that’s not there anymore. A lot of the stuff vBulletin offered we are doing ourselves with EE templates and such. As for bandwidth and all, I’m not sure how the comparison goes. We never did any testing. We are sure bandwidth usage did NOT go up. So that’s a plus.

Would PairLite be an option?

Certainly. Pair, PairLite, are very dependable hosts. EngineHosting could be considered, too. It’s unlikely that you’ll see much difference in bandwidth usage between EE Forums and vBulletin. If you switch, it’s also unlikely that many users will complain, as most don’t use the extra features in vBulletin. Again, if it were me, I wouldn’t make a change to EE unless there’s a compelling reason.

I think the site will stay on vbulletin for some time - I wouldn’t want to upset the natives immediately 😊 I’m much more comfortable in EE, and would make the change eventually I think.

Hosting looks to be the biggest challenge - they have had a max connected users at one time of just over 400 users, which I understand being one of the main factors in shared hosting.

If this does come about, I’ll take a good look at EEHosting - I hadn’t considered it for non EE needs! Thanks for the assistance and host recommendations.