Time for more bandwidth?

As the site's popularity has exploded recently, I often get this error:

Quote: There seems to have been a slight problem with the database.
Please try again by pressing the refresh button in your browser.

An E-Mail has been dispatched to our Technical Staff, who you can also contact if the problem persists.

We apologise for any inconvenience. Also, for the first time today I got an error that there were "too many connections to < site stuff . phpbb/mysql > stuff.

Might have to explore more bandwidth.

Extra bandwidth costs quite a bit of money, we will have to wait and see if our ads are enough to support an expansion

Believe me, THX, I feel your pain. Didn't know if anyone else had been experiencing this as well.

Thanks for the response.

See what we need to do is have everybody on the forums click on the google adds when we log on. I make about 800 dollars a month off my blogs adds and have not even had 1/100th the number of the people on this sight daily on my blog in its entire life.

And yes it happens to me quite often to with the database error.

Nope sorry pls dont do that if your not really interested in the ads, its against the TOS of Google and it doesnt help really. Don't worry, we're working on optimizing the site and keeping everything running 24x7

^^
I know I was joking. I stil made enough to support my site and pocket the extra but with this site you prolly need a lot more money to keep it running.

I'm curious about approx. how much bandwidth per month a forum/site this large consumes? Is that something the site owners are willing to divulge? If not, that's ok....

Quote: Originally Posted by CatLady

Hmm...interesting, thanks for that. You can run numbers in your head but it's never the same as knowing what a site actually gets.

I have no idea what you're paying now, but Hurricane Electric does 1200GB bandwidth for about $300 a month, non-dedicated server. They have dedicated servers and co-lo etc. as well.
I've been doing my own research into such things and can be hard to find a good company that's not one of those cheapie places that offers the sun & moon for $10 (usually w/severe qualifications that make them liars, anyway). It may come down to running my own co-lo server instead, lol.

Anyway...good luck with finding a solution, assuming one is even needed yet. So hard to decide what's best sometimes.

Yeah - we are on a dedicated dual xeon 3.6ghz with 4 gb ram

Non dedicate with the hits this website gets would fry their shared hosting.