Why not just beef up your hosting? Or, get a pro to optimize your installation?

Assuming the forum traffic is relevant and on-topic for your website, closing the forum or disconnecting it may not make a lot of sense.

There have been discussions here of how to better integrate forum traffic with your non-forum content to produce the desired behavior - ecommerce orders, ad exposures, etc. In general, clear and prolific linking both in navigation and posts is the key factor.

thanks for the reply.

For financial reasons, I'm would like to avoid going from a shared hosting package to dedicated at $200-500/month for at least a couple more months.

I need to research the different plans available ect..
I am finding all the options for web hosting incredibly confusing.
The company I'm with doesn't offer dedicated hosting for windows and switching hosts in my limited experience is a nightmare

Or, get a pro to optimize your installation?

What type of optimization are you referring to?
I know the problem is that I am repeatedly hitting the 100 concurrent connection limit. So if someone attempts to connect to my website while their are already 100 active connections, the user will receive the service unavailable page.

Do you think there are code fixes I can do to which would help solve the problem at least temporarily?

Most forum software sites have their own forums, and you'll undoubtedly find discussion about how to optimize the software for best performance. Typically, there are ways to reduce the number of database queries per page, use more cached data, etc.

You might check to see how many of your connections are bots - either legitimate search engine spiders or rogue scrapers and such. If your software has a "who's online" function it may show well-known bots like Googlebot by name. Otherwise, you'll need to check your logs. If bots are a big part of your traffic, you may be able to do some throttling in robots.txt (for good bots) or some IP blocking.

If you are really experiencing lots of human traffic, that should be a good thing. But the "too many connections" problem may not be fixable in your shared environment. One quick step would be to put in a trouble ticket with your current host to see if they can help you solve it.

Consider moving to a VPS (virtual private server) as a step between cheap shared hosting and your own dedicated box. You'll not only get more server resources, you'll have access to more settings (like database connections) for optimizing your site.

Either way, I'd fix this quickly. A site that's often unavailable forces users to go elsewhere and, perhaps, not return.

Thanks, I have a post on the help forum for my forum(Snitz) but so far no input. I have a lot of human traffic. I doubt it's bots that are causing the problem.

I just found some code which Is part an include file. I wonder if it causing the problem.

It displays the menu on every single page of my site. It opens a separate connection to the database, write the menu and then closes the connection.
The problem is there is already a connection opened which is not closed until later on in the page.

My web host doesn't offer anything for windows hosting besides a shared plan.

I will look into a vps. Do you have any suggestion of sites that offer legitimate reviews of web hosts for windows vps.

It seems everyone is trying to make money as resellers. It's impossible to get unbiased reviews. What are the big hosting companies. I'm using Network Solutions right now.

Thanks for the help

A managed VPS is probably right up your alley, the trick is finding a reliable company that still has reasonable prices and good support. I'd look for a smaller company that has their own servers. ;)

I posed the hypothetical question in my providers forum and it was suggested a VPS with 256MB of ram optimized for just a forum alone could probably handle 250+ visitors continuously. My best guesstimate is the average shared hosting plan is going to hit the limits for most hosts at about 20 visitors continuously online.

There's a lot of "what if's" involved with those numbers but a VPS is going to have a lot more resources than any shared hosting plan by far. Note that most VPS's won't come close to the bandwidth or disc space offered for shared but ultimately that's just a marketing gimmick because you'll never use that bandwidth or disc space anyway because of the CPU and Mysql limits.

Thanks I started researching web hosting packages and this is going to be a real pain. I started with "The planet", because I just read a news story about them, 6000 of their web servers blew up. See, there is no such thing as bad publicity :)

Anyway they only offer dedicated hosting for $275/month

I think i have become the victom of my own success, by growing out of shared hosting package. i will keep on looking thanks!

It also should be noted that making a profit from a forum is tough in itself.

i know, I don't even display ads on the forum, even though my entire site revenue is built on display ads.
However the forum does add a lot of credibility to my site and it also gives me an oppurtunity to interact with a tiny percentage of my site visitors and hopefully learn a bunch about all the rest of my visiors.

I don't want to shut it down

Consider selling a sponsorship of the forum to one or several of your advertisers. That will avoid low CTR, low revenue solutions like Adsense. Capable VPS setups cost under $100 per month, so you should be able to pay for that and more.