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When to move to a VPS?
Hi, I currently have about 2000 registered users with some 100 unique visits perday. I have bluehost hosting vanilla forum. I was wondering when it would be a good time to upgrade to a VPS. I would appreciate if any experienced webmasters out there tell me how to assess this.
Thanks!
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Comments
As a non-webmaster. I would think you would want to do this when you see performance issues and switching to a vps (assuming it is not oversubscribed) should improve things if you do have performance issues.
I may not provide the completed solution you might desire, but I do try to provide honest suggestions to help you solve your issue.
I would do it before performance issues hit. You shouldn't overkill but you should always have little extra, capacity. At this first rung, quite honestly if you can do it earlier then do it.
Nowadays vps are more and more like dedicated servers, so you have more control.
Also I would not fall into the trap of host that claim "unlimited" this and that, be sure that is limited and you know what these limits are. You will be "throttled" otherwise, and this is to convince you to "upgrade", and the upgrade is rarely worth it.
You need to shop around, away get all the metrics, avoid unlimited or ambiguous data.
A company like bluehost the majority of the business is in the high volume, "cram them in" cheap as chips hosting, you get what you pay for. Just becuase the offer other product, doesn’t mean you should take those offers.
The real question is budget and if you need managed vps. Unless you are comfortable managing servers (in which case you probably wouldn't be asking this), you probably need some degree of management.
What you also need to find out is if you want vps or dedicated. I can't 100% answer that for you it really come down to the deals, your monthly budget, an many other considerations. You will be surprised that you can sometime get discounted rate on dedicated, which can be as good. On the other hand the high end VPS can be as good too.
Cloud is another option, although it might be the next rung, on the other hand for some things it is the first rung. But for just a forums, I would say get more established first.
grep is your friend.
I've been eyeing something like Digital Ocean which is a bit more developer-oriented (self-serve) but the price & specs are nice. I currently use LiquidWeb, which is wonderfully hands-on support. My opinion on when to upgrade from something like GoDaddy or BlueHost is "the minute the thought crosses your mind".
Congrats on growing your forum!
Liquidweb are good, the support is good and prompt. Though they can make assumptions, or rash decisions, some are better than others, you get whoever on shift.
grep is your friend.
I just set up my Digital Ocean VPS last month and am in the process of moving a bunch of small sites to it.
I give it a thumbs up and recommendation.
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My experience exactly. I've long ago learned to preface every ticket with background information and expectations for what I expect the solution to involve. I also don't hesitate to ask for a senior technician if the request warrants it.
Hi all, thanks for the comments. I've been using pingdom.com to track my site and in the last 7 days my site has been down 7 times and a total of 1h35m with the longest episode being 43 min. According to pingdom.com my site has been up 99.05%.
Is this value low/average/high? Can anyone share their thoughts?
Thanks,
Ricardo
It does sound like you are being heavily throttled, or you host simply sucks at hosting. Sometimes it can mean that you have an inefficient script or process, but I would not trust the diagnosis on a low end host. First often they don't know what they are talking about and just read from a script, secondly it is all sales driven to get you to upgrade, it is not really technical help at all.
No joke I once had a case where the guy reported back the least used script, not he most. he has sorted his logs in ascending order. That is probably the one thing he has to get right all day.
I should point out that I "use" liquidweb as a consultant, I don't use them for my own stuff as it doesn't suit my particular needs. Specs wise they are good but not amazing. What you are pay for is a decent management service, which is good for that entry level.
Secondly liquidweb has had outages, they all do. The main thing is how they respond to them. Generally specially they try to keep you site up, if fact sometimes to they a bit overly enthusiastic to get your site back up.
Still shop around
grep is your friend.