When is it time for a VPS?

[spanishben]

Hi, my site has around 30 to 60 people on line at any one time, 1250 users, 1800 threads and 20,000 posts. Up until now I have been with asmallorange.com shared hosting but they are giving me downtime of half an hour a day at the moment and I am fed up.

They tell me that i use up to 5 percent of the memory on their 4gb servers at peak times, so about 200 mb. I really want to change host and they suggested moving up to a vps to avoid problems with their shared plans but also said it wasn't entirely necessary just yet. So, I could just look for more shared hosting elsewhere, but then again that will always mean potential problems and possibly another move soon when my forum grows...

Is it crazy to go for a VPS wit these figures, and if so, is there a shared host out there that will be more reliable? Seems all good hosts soon pack out their servers and become bad ones and I'm willing to spend 45 dollars on a VPS to avoid all this annoyance. Any thoughts?

[Gene Steinberg]

Hi, my site has around 30 to 60 people on line at any one time, 1250 users, 1800 threads and 20,000 posts. Up until now I have been with asmallorange.com shared hosting but they are giving me downtime of half an hour a day at the moment and I am fed up.

They tell me that i use up to 5 percent of the memory on their 4gb servers at peak times, so about 200 mb. I really want to change host and they suggested moving up to a vps to avoid problems with their shared plans but also said it wasn't entirely necessary just yet. So, I could just look for more shared hosting elsewhere, but then again that will always mean potential problems and possibly another move soon when my forum grows...

Is it crazy to go for a VPS wit these figures, and if so, is there a shared host out there that will be more reliable? Seems all good hosts soon pack out their servers and become bad ones and I'm willing to spend 45 dollars on a VPS to avoid all this annoyance. Any thoughts?

I've had as many as 91 users on at any one time at www.theparacast.com/forums (http://www.theparacast.com/forums) without seriously impacting CPU and/or memory performance over at DreamHost. But this is a largely text-based forum, and we have just one solitary add-on, to provide a global announcement banner.

On the other hand, if you're using lots of mods with your forum, or lots of image files are downloaded and uploaded I can see where resources might be stretched.

Can you be more specific?

Peace,
Gene

[spanishben]

There are quite a lot of images on there, and a lot of embedded video recently too, not sure if that is a big resource user?

[medialayer]

Static documents & media, i.e. images, will only take up raw disk space and transfer [bandwidth]. They will not, however, use a significant amount of CPU resources on the server. vBulletin and its associated modules is what will 'peg' the CPU. You will find that some hosts are more suitable than others for hosting vBulletin based sites and the barrier between shared hosting and a VPS tends to vary. What many will not tell you is that it is possible for a shared hosting account to be more cost effective and be able to "handle more" than a VPS -- but you need to find the proper host, and looking at hosts who do not oversell, or do not oversell to an extreme is a great start.

Best,

[encryption]

^^ Agreed with what he said. If you have a non-modded board and without any ads running on it (in my experience those add to the slowdown), then a good host can easily let you rest on a semi dedicated server.

I have a server (shared environment) where the cumulative number of members is over 300 and it does fine to be honest.

I personally haven't figured all the fuss about getting a VPS. I mean yes you get your own dedicated space at a fraction of the cost but its like a fifth or an eight of a box to begin with and from a clients standpoint, its not the best way to do things because if the server is mixed in with a good amount of non cpu hungry and cpu hungry sites (and the cpu hungry site is paying a larger share of the server) and if the client's forum is growing really fast, then they have the advantage of using more of the CPUs time than a VPS will let them and it wont affect the performance of the machine overall.

That is better situation imo because then the client doesnt need to go shopping immediately after moving to a server like this even if they grow too fast. In the case of a VPS, they have no choice but to upgrade.