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Hi hydrO,
I've been doing a lot of research regarding XOOPS and shared hosting. My conclusion is that shared hosting is only appropriate for certain kinds of traffic patterns. Shared hosting will work if you have moderate to high traffic that is spread out over time. If you have a moderate to high traffic volume during certain times or all the time, then your site will probably slow to a crawl or lockup quite frequently (if your host doesn't shut you down before that happens). However, if the traffic isn't concentrated within certain time periods, then shared hosting may work out.
The most important consideration regarding moderate to high traffic is how concentrated that traffic is. Having 1500 registered members doesn't really tell us how it will affect the efficiency of Xoops. If many of the 1500 members tend to visit the site between 7:00 and 10:00 PM on weeknights, then the site will likely experience problems during that time, since it will be a struggle to obtain the necessary CPU/RAM/MySQL resources in a shared environment. If on average, the 1500 members tend to sporadically visit the site throughout the month, then there is less likely to be high concentrations of traffic at certain times.
Another factor to consider is the length of time that the average visitor tends to remain active on the site. If the average visitor just briefly visits the site to check for the latest news or updates, then the combined demand (of all current visitors) on resources at any given time will tend to be less (on average). However, if the average visitor tends to hang around for a while and move around the site quite a bit, then the combined demand (of all current visitors) on resources will tend to be higher (on average)
The big difficulty is determining how your traffic will behave prior to setting up an XOOPS site. Educated or common sense guesses may or may not be on the mark. The best information comes from observing what happens after the site goes live. Although, a frequently crawling or crashing site may turn away lots of visitors, and it is very hard to recover visitors once they leave in frustration. Thus, if you can afford a VPS or dedicated server, then I wouldn't bother experimenting on a shared server.
As for shared hosting, I don't know where the dividing line is between acceptable resource usage and resource usage that pulls down the efficiency of the site. There are many other factors that complicate this, such has how graphic intensive your site is, how many modules there are to use, how efficient the modules operate, how often other sites on your shared server drain the server's resources, and the limits that the host establishes for concurrent database connections and CPU usage (the hosts usually don't clarify this until there is a problem, or unless you ask or spend a lot of time looking for the fine print).
As for VPS, the more I research it, the more I like the sound of it. It "appears" that a VPS is much more able to handle an XOOPS site with a significant volume of traffic. I've been told that 256MB of RAM on a VPS will adequately handle a moderate traffic database driven site. 256MB of RAM seems to be the low end and cheapest of VPS packages. Although, for a moderate traffic site, I would probably look for at least a 512MB RAM package, with 1GB of burstable RAM (that is just my preference though, and I don't have any experience with a VPS to back that up). The only problem is that the price tends to jump quite significantly for 512MB packages.
Anyway, I'm going to put a low to moderate traffic XOOPS site on a shared server soon. I expect/hope that the traffic will be spread out enough, so that the server will handle it satisfactorily. I will let everyone know how it turns out. I also have plans for another site, but I'm waiting until I can afford a VPS, since I believe that the traffic will be too high and concentrated for a shared server.
Dave