| I'm co-owner of a forum/site which has just reached the 5 Million views a year mark. Although we aren't a social networking site we have the forum, an extensive photo gallery, a chatroom as well as regular news/content. Not a social networking site, but enough on there to give a reasonable comparison IMO.
We currently use a shared plan and we don't use anywhere near the 5TB monthly bandwidth allowance or the 500GB diskspace and although the company have been pretty helpful in moving us around to keep us on servers with lower load we are at the stage whereby we are starting to cause regular stress on the shared resources wherever they put us. So much so that we've had to make some compromises on the site to reduce load until we get a chance to switch to a dedicated server.
I've never been under any illusion with using shared hosts and always knew the day would come when we'd need to step up to dedicated server (despite never having used anything like the limits they say you have in terms of bandwidth and diskspace)....but as you can see, if your looking at 10,000 active members then your soon going to go well beyond what I use now and a shared host will simply not be able to cope with that.
Our current host offers scalable VPS, but by the time we ramp up everything we need to the level we need, we're cheaper going the fully dedicated route. |