Some pre-purchase questions

I am considering purchasing vBSEO for a forum which I started in December 2009. The site is www.mu-43.com.

Question 1: Will vBSEO help us? I think we're doing pretty well in building community and content. We haven't done any SEO yet. Here are a couple of our growth curves from Google Analytics:






Question 2: We are running vBulletin 3.8.4. If the answer to Q1 is yes, should we wait until we got to vBulletin 4 before getting vBSEO?

Question 3: Seems like vBSEO 3.5 Gold is almost here. If the answer to Q1 is yes and Q2 is no, should we wait until vBSEO 3.5 is here before installing it?

Question 4: Can anyone tell me in easy to understand terms just how much of an extra demand vBSEO puts on the server? Our forum is on a shared plan, and our ad revenue won't pay for a VPS or dedicated server at this time. However, our host (URLJet) recommends vBSEO and says that it shouldn't be a problem.

Thanks, I know these questions have been asked before. Believe it or not, I have done plenty of searching and read a lot of relevant threads, but would still appreciate any informed words relevant to my specific situation as the owner of a relatively young, growing forum.

Amin

vBSEO is perfect for site's like yours that have a good chunk of content and a good user base already to continue to add more and more content. With vbseo, you can easily crank up your traffic, especially in the % of visits from google. You're hovering around 35% from those stats. You can reach as high as 80% or more from google with the aid of vbseo, all the while increasing your direct traffic and gaining links from referring sites.

vBSEO works on both vb3 and vb4. 3.5 Is in RC3 status. Gold is just around the corner. You can alwasy install vbseo 3.3.2 on your vb3.x site for now and work out your vb4 upgrade when it comes time. There are basically no new features in vbseo 3.5 over 3.3.2 for vb3 forums, so running 3.3.2 is not going to be a problem, and in fact, i would recommend 3.3.2 for vb3.x boards as it is the latest stable release for production sites.

vBSEO does add a bit of server load, but not too too much. I personally saw a .2 gain in load averages when i first installed. Of course, as vbseo works, you will get more and more traffic and regular members which may deem it necessary to upgrade in the future off shared hosting.... but you should also be making more advertising money by then too. vBSEO also has built in adsense targetting features to help display the most relevant ads per thread.

Brian,

Thanks for your considerate reply.

Although only 35% of our traffic for the past several months has come from search, that number has been increasing and is close to 50% for the past month. Still, more would be better .

It's good to know that 3.3.2 basically has all the 3.5 features as far as vb3 forums are concerned. I'm not planning to go to vb4 for quite a while.

Does "0.2 gain in load averages" mean 20% more work for the server?

Thanks again,
Amin

Hello Amin ,

Related load levels the expected increase is not 20% . An example : If your load averages are 0.10 0.15 0.13 prior vBSEO installation , after installation the maximum load average you should expect is 0.30 0.35 0.33 . In my server the difference is way lower.

Hi Mert,

Sorry, I don't understand what these terms mean, so let me put things differently to see if you can explain on my level.

Our site was hosted on a cheap plan at Hostgator. Periodically, I would get "too many connections" errors, so I recently (yesterday) moved our site to URLJet. URLJet (pre-sales) told me that the shared plan I was choosing would have no problem handling a site of our size and activity, and though their hosting cost nearly 5x more than what I was paying at Hostgator, they also seem to have a better reputation (not overselling) and offer more services (hourly backups, free installation/upgrades of vb software, etc).

Anyway, this morning I got my first "too many connections" errors on our new host, which makes me wonder whether our new hosting will in fact have resources to spare, as they told me (pre-sales) that it would. If I install vBSEO and suddenly we're getting those errors more often, then I'll be stuck since I can't afford to go to a VPS yet (our ad revenues won't support that).

So... can you explain in terms I can understand how likely it is that installing vBSEO will render our current, new hosting inadequate?

Thanks again,
Amin

Hello Amin ,

I never personally used UrlJet however what i can say is vBSEO is being runned on shared hostings by too many customers. However as your traffic grows in time , you may need to move to a better hosting plan in future. Can you please contact UrlJet and ask what are the limitations on your account and what are current average server loads so we can give you a better answer. I just don't want to say it will not cause a problem as there are some known hosting companies that choose to overload their servers and any mod_rewrite action can cause problems. You can check following thread for vBSEO owners hosting company suggestions Good web hosts for VBSEO-powered forums

Thanks Mert. URLJet has a reputation for not overloading their servers, which is why I moved to them from Hostgator. I'm actually paying almost 5x as much to be with URLJet.

I emailed URLJet support to ask them why I got the db errors early this AM, and they replied that "Most likely you still had some users hitting your OLD [Hostgator] server still because there DNS has not propagated. You would still get these emails. I checked this server has not even come close to any max connection issues."

So that was reassuring. I'm going to go ahead and purchase vBSEO. Wish me good luck!

Amin

If you have any more questions please feel free to ask them , Good luck with your vBSEO experiment

On the purchase page, it asks for "Exact Forum URL where vBSEO will be installed". In my case, should I answer "http://www.mu-43.com", "http://www.mu-43.com/forum.php", or something else?

You should use Mu-43.com - Micro Four Thirds User Group

Welcome abaord

Thanks guys, I'm excited to install. For starters, I think our members will love having their username in their blog address!

I just want to add, for anyone who finds this thread and is in my position, that this was an incredibly easy installation.

Great to hear