Hello

[Najib]

First of all thank you for setting up this very resourceful forum.

I have some questions please.

I run a vbulletin php forum to share mp3 of old 78rpm records. The forum is currently hosted with canaca in Canada.

Sometimes forum members use download managers and that opens many connections at the same time causing canaca to sometime suspend the account.

The questions are: would moving to a VPS server provide better resource control, and if by mistake or malicious act someone decides to open many connections, would that affect the other servers, or just my VPS server alone?

Is there a technical solution to users who try to open many connections, regardless of whether the server is shared/VPS?

At the moment we are getting a message from the mySQL about which user is opening many connections, and we can ban the ip address but this all reactive, we need a proactive measure.

Thanks
Najib

[monaghan]

A VPS will give you a guaranteed slice of the server resource whereas a shared server is pretty much a free-for-all.

You will also have root access, so you could look at either a commercial system or a home brew to monitor connections and then limit connections yourself either at the forum or at the server level.

The down side of a VPS is that a cheap VPS will not have much resource, so you'll need to pay out for a reasonable spec VPS, it is in effect a server, so you'll need server admin skills. You may be better off renting a small dedicated server.