I had a phone call the other day from the hosting provider who hosts the forum to inform me that we are using more than our fair share of the CPU. I was given two choices.
1) We change over to their parent company on a different plan where each CPU on the server only has 3 users, so we will get 1/3 of the CPU.
2) We find another hosting provider...
Nice choices.
Of course this is going to cost a fair bit more, and evidently we are still going to be close to using our 1/3 CPU allocation at our current usage. He assures me that I won't need to upgrade it again within the next 6 months or so unless things here increased very suddenly. The next upgrade which will probably have to happen within 12 months will over triple the new hosting price, and effectively be about 10 times the current costs.
It's obviously something they consider quite urgent too because he rang me again today asking when we will do the conversion.
The change over will be happening sometime in the next week or so and this will mean that things will be down for a period of about 4 hours. I'm doing a complete backup of everything at the moment in preparation but they have assured me it will be incredibly smooth and there should be no disruptions apart from the few hours of down time when they change it over.
I will keep you all informed as to exactly when it's going to happen...
Joel
Now if you where talking about setting up hosting for maybe somethingawful.com (8,039 registered users logged in, 69,195,160 total posts) but we are a long way from that kind of traffic.