Hosting problems. Help!

I have a lot of problems with the speed of the forum. I have upgraded from version 6.3 to 7.9 in order to fix this problem. But it still exists. After all my promotion of the site I am loosing members rapidly. I now believe it to be caused by the server it is installed on. The hosting service says the problems occur because of bad programming & sql statements and therefore amounts of members would be to heavy on their server. But since the slowness/server errors do occur not only when there are many members, but also when there are few members I do not believe that and think something is wrong with the server. I would like to show the hosting service that there are other forums which succesfully have large amounts of members. Could you please post a few links to such webwiz forums with many members? I could use this against their arguments. I really need to fix this problem.

The problem isn't bad programming as the programming in the forum is very tight.

The problem often comes from using Access as your database backend.

Access as a flat file database system uses allot of the web servers resources which slow down the entire server.

Access works OK with forum software if you have a small forum with only a handful of members, but if your forum is large or has allot of members that use the forum it will really push the server as each time a page in the forum is called the entire Access flat file needs to be loaded into memory also using up connections from the limited Access database pool available to all sites on the server.

If your forum is at all large or popular you should consider using the MS SQL Server version as SQL Server not being a flat file system and also usually having the SQL Server located on dedicated server, is much better at handling things like forum software.

If you want performance you should upgrade to MS SQL Server.

While you should certainly consider moving to MS SQL Server for a large forum, I can attest that WWG will certainly handle a load even under Access.

Here are the stats of my largest forum:

We have 14040 Forum Members
Avg New Members per day: 45.72 (excluding today)
New Members today (so far): 3 | Yesterday: 23
# of Members Visiting Site Today: 107 (excluding new members)
We have 4163 Posts in 744 Topics in 21 Forum(s)

*Note: I have purged the database twice removing approx 4k members each time who had no posts in 30 days. Current database size is 14MB.

At peak times, my active users list will show 80-160 members, although normally it cruises along between 20-40. This is the key with Access, concurrent connections. It does not handle lots of connections as MS SQL Server can; however, if the server is setup properly and  you maintain the database, Access can do ok up to a point. Yes, I am on a shared server as well. My host has to restart the server about once a week, but that is fairly typical on a shared MS server and was happening before I started that forum anyway.

I hope this information helps. In summary, yes WWG will definitely scale. It naturally performs very well under MS SQL Server, but also performs very respectably under Access.

Anyone? I was getting about 100 new members a day until the server errors started to chase them off. I now get around 1500 pageviews a day.