changing hosting plans

[blueberry]

hi everyone..

i hope i can get an advice on my specific case.. i have been roaming around this forum and i found lots of information.. but i hope to get a reply in this page considering my case in particular..

my forum has over 1000 registered members.. at one time there will be 10 users on the site (member+non members+bots) it gets up to 20 online users at once... i run arcade, photogallery and articles on top of the forum..

i am currenlty hosting with godaddy.com , i am using a shared server with the following details: • 100 GB Space • 1,000 GB Transfer

I am experiencing problems now with the site.. it is very slow in loading up and sometimes times out and gives an error..

i called godaddy and they told me that with my current traffic i need to upgrade to VPS... what do you think? do i really need a VPS to start with? (I feel that the concurrent online users are not much in my case)
and if i want to go with VPS do you think i should stay with godaddy or there are better hosting companies around.. can you give an advice to my particular case? Thanks alot...

By the way they offered me the following plan:
• 10GB disk space • 500GB bandwidth
• Red Hat Fedora Core 4 OS

[Floris]

That is just another way of GoDaddy to get you on a VPS when you don't need to. That is just their way of not solving the hosting performance problem, but rather a way to get you to pay for more.

10 users to 20 users online, with just 1000 users in the database is considered a small forum. Any respectable hosting company can offer a good shared hosting solution that will run your forum just fine.

My own site has been running on shared hosting for a year or so with 5000+ registered users, 250 online users and growing up to 100,000 posts. Now with those stats we moved to a VPS, not before.

I recommend looking into a different hosting provider and check for an affordable hosting package for either shared hosting or a VPS that's still in your budget. Remember that VPS is still "shared hosting", meaning you do not have the only account on the server, it are just less users, and it is virtual. If GoDaddy can't host 10 online users on Shared hosting I wonder if their VPS can handle 20.. to 50.

[Gene Steinberg]

That is just another way of GoDaddy to get you on a VPS when you don't need to. That is just their way of not solving the hosting performance problem, but rather a way to get you to pay for more.

10 users to 20 users online, with just 1000 users in the database is considered a small forum. Any respectable hosting company can offer a good shared hosting solution that will run your forum just fine.

My own site has been running on shared hosting for a year or so with 5000+ registered users, 250 online users and growing up to 100,000 posts. Now with those stats we moved to a VPS, not before.

I recommend looking into a different hosting provider and check for an affordable hosting package for either shared hosting or a VPS that's still in your budget. Remember that VPS is still "shared hosting", meaning you do not have the only account on the server, it are just less users, and it is virtual. If GoDaddy can't host 10 online users on Shared hosting I wonder if their VPS can handle 20.. to 50.

I would agree thoroughly, but will add the fact that GoDaddy is notorious for mediocre customer support and an overly-restrictive Terms of Service.

I ran into performance problems, and the other two issues and moved to DreamHost, where my sites load several times faster during so-called "peak" hours.

My vBulletin forum at www.theparacast.com/forums has close to 5,000 messages and has had as many as 61 people online, but it's a young forum and growth is increasing at a fairly good clip. So far we've not seen the need for any dedicated solution. Some day.

My advice: Leave GoDaddy and don't pay attention to their "bait and switch" schemes to extract extra money from you. Their low-cost hosting is largely a method to upsell you to other plans. They make everything optional, such as decent stats, and even mailboxes with decent amounts of storage space.

Peace,
Gene

[blueberry]

thanks guys for the answers. i really appreciate it.. at least now i know i really dont need a VPS at the moment... i have to look into other solutions...

[blueberry]

can anyone suggest a reliable hosting company please!! thanks alot..

[Gene Steinberg]

can anyone suggest a reliable hosting company please!! thanks alot..

I use DreamHost, and despite some misleading chatter in another thread, they work just fine and meet my expectations.

Peace,
Gene

[Floris]

ev1servers.net
steadfast.net
theplanet.com
site5
erhm... webhostingtalk.com probably has a lot of reviews

[SaN-DeeP]

Check www.servint.net/vps

[blueberry]

Are all of them in US? is there anything in europe?
This is another challenge.. as embargoed countries cant access sites hosted in a US host..

[LSIntegra94]

Floris, could you tell us how much guaranteed RAM and burst RAM you have and what control panel if any you are using?

[Floris]

We have 128MB ram, 8core xeon cpu, and 10gb hard drive space. We use one server, VPS set up. no control panel. This only handles the www/mysql, the dns/mail and irc network are different servers.

[Gene Steinberg]

We have 128MB ram, 8core xeon cpu, and 10gb hard drive space. We use one server, VPS set up. no control panel. This only handles the www/mysql, the dns/mail and irc network are different servers.

All that power with 128MB of RAM? That's hardly anything anymore.

Peace,
Gene

[Floris]

There's average of 19mb free space, seems to be doing well for now :)

[LSIntegra94]

Thank you.

This is interesting. Is burst RAM about 1 gig? What are the specs for the second machine? I assume the IRC keeps it busy and that the RAM is a bit higher.

[Floris]

irc isn't a real stresser, we use multi-server setup to spread the load and round robin dns. So if someone connects to the main irc.vbulletin-chat.com they get randomly directed to one of the underlying leaf servers. If for example 5 people are online, this could mean each server has 1 online user, and that there are 5 total on the network. We can currently hold up to 3000 unique users online at the same time before the servers all start breaking a sweat.

Each ircd has different specs. They're all on dedicated machines that are set up with individual accounts for different customers.