CPU minutes?

For the past couple of days, I've been thinking about signing up with Dreamhost. The deals seem pretty good and I've seen many people on this forum say they're a great hosting company.

I just have a few questions though. What are CPU minutes and how are they calculated? I've read that the limit is 60, but that's all I know.

Would it be possible for me to install the vBulletin forum software with a Shared hosting plan and if so, would it use a lot of CPU minutes? I know Bandwidth wouldn't be a problem, but it's the possibility of going over in CPU minutes is what I'm concerned with.

I was also thinking of setting up the site with Wordpress and use it as a small blog. Would this combined with vBulletin(if installation is possible) make me go over in CPU minutes?

I was thinking of having just a small community of users and not making it a huge site. If it turned into a huge site, I would definately try to get a dedicated server.

Any help would be great. Thanks in advance if anyone can help me.

Hey Bakira,

The public discussion about resource usage is going on over on the blog:
http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/05/18/the-truth-about-overselling/

My comment about cpu minutes specifically can be found here:
http://blog.dreamhost.com/2006/05/18/the-truth-about-overselling/#comment-5165

The bottom line though is that you will be fine running those sites. Hope that helps!

Thanks for the links. I kinda thought that was how the minutes were calculated, but I wasn't sure.

So, just as long as I have a small community, the minutes wouldn't be a problem if I had a blog and a forum?

And if so, would it be easy to install vBulletin? Reason why I'm asking is because that's the software I'm most familiar with and I prefer it over phpBB and Invision.

No the minutes would not be a problem. We have customers using vBulletin, so if you have set it up on linux before you will be able to do it here as well.