vB4, CPU usage and Shared Hosting

[Ahmed]

A couple of days ago, the company that hosts my site -(since 2 years without any trouble)- sent me an email telling me that my site
constantly uses a large mount amount of the server's CPU resource.

They informed me that my account's CPU usage is 45,000 script executions per day. The industry standard for CPU usage of a shared account is 12,000 (800 per hour). They said I should upgrade to dedicated box if I want them to continue hosting my site.

After I got their email I submitted a support ticket to vB and their response was quick pretty useful.
I've removed more than half of the add-ones and disabled the rest of plug-ins except three, and Disabled -as possible- vB default options that may take server resources.

After all what I've done of optimization/changes to my site, my site's CPU usage now is stil between 20,000 and 25,000 script executions per day (1000 - 3000 per hour).
Please note that I've lost about 16% of my visitors/traffic since the changes I made and that hurts me a lot.

My site is not really big:

• Users: 6,923
• Threads: 8,751
• Posts: 86,666
• Visits per day: 1,200 - 1600 visitor

And here are statistics of May 2010 (last month):

• Unique visitors: 33,974 ==> (Average/day (1095.93))
• Number of visits: 47,228 ==> (Average/day (1523.48))
• Pages: 406,290 ==> (Average/day (13106.13))
• Hits: 3,002,580 ==> (Average/day (96857.42))
• Bandwidth: 15.81 GB ==> (Average/day (522.40 MB))

Now I'm wondering:

1. I was thinking if vB 4.0.4 is good/buggy-less enough (specially RTL and IE6 issues), I'm going to upgrade when it's released, but I'm worried about if there is a big difference in performance so vB 4 will increase the CPU usage and the amount of script executions. I'm asking who have upgraded to vB4 about this, does vb4 use CPU resources and execute scripts more than vB4?
2. Do you think my site is big enough to go to VPS or dedicated hosting? (Please take in mind that I'm not making money from my site yet and it will take time to earn some funds from it, so I want to spend as minimum as possible on site hosting.)
3. If I should get VPS or dedicated box, what are your recommendations for the CPU, RAM, Disk and other stuff?
4. Which is better, VPS or Dedicated box (as I'm expecting my site's traffic will increase about 30% by the end of 2010 if every thing went well)?

I hope you can help me guys, because I'm losing visitors every day and I want things to get back to what they were ASAP.

I really appreciate your advice.

Regards

Sorry for any typo!

[ryan1918]

It seems they don't want you anymore, and they just want to get a ton of money out of you, I got solutions, pm me

[anthonyparsons]

Can I ask what your bounce rate is? It seems to me you are doing things to get traffic in vs. targeted traffic that is actually participating on your site. If you are using any type off SEO tool, ie. long tail traffic, etc, get rid of it if you don't have the funds for VPS. Traffic visiting that is not converting into registered users / readers, is a waste. If my suspicions are correct looking at your figures, then by doing something as simple as this, you should also lower your executions and keep your server costs low.

Traffic equals cost... something many don't think about when wanting, traffic, traffic, traffic. If your site is well designed without any tricks for traffic, your visitor rate should be much higher than your unique visitors.

If you have to move to VPS, then a quality VPS is going to far outweight a desktop PC that you rent as a server for cost comparison.

[Ahmed]

It seems they don't want you anymore, and they just want to get a ton of money out of you, I got solutions, pm me

Thanks ryan.
I just need to analyze the issue as my site traffic suddenly increased in the middle of May.
Will keep an eye on your offer.

[Ahmed]

Can I ask what your bounce rate is? It seems to me you are doing things to get traffic in vs. targeted traffic that is actually participating on your site. If you are using any type off SEO tool, ie. long tail traffic, etc, get rid of it if you don't have the funds for VPS. Traffic visiting that is not converting into registered users / readers, is a waste. If my suspicions are correct looking at your figures, then by doing something as simple as this, you should also lower your executions and keep your server costs low.

Traffic equals cost... something many don't think about when wanting, traffic, traffic, traffic. If your site is well designed without any tricks for traffic, your visitor rate should be much higher than your unique visitors.

If you have to move to VPS, then a quality VPS is going to far outweight a desktop PC that you rent as a server for cost comparison.

My bounce rate now is 60% - 63% which is higher 10% - 13% than it was before making the changes to the site and removing/disabling plug-ins and vB default options. Registered users rate also has decreased about 45% since the changes. I'm sure there was plug-in that was attracting visitors to my site, but I'm not sure which one it was.

As for the SEO tools, I don't use any type of SEO tools except vBSEO Google/Yahoo Sitemap Generator. I don't even know what long-tail traffic means or what it is for (pls excuse my ignorance), I'd like to know more about it if possible...

Yes I want more traffic, I'm also aware of its cost. I just want to make sure that my site is big/"has a real traffic" enough to move to VPS or dedicated host. I still don't know much about such things as this is my first website which I feel it grows as time goes. I have some plans to expand the site and improve it within next few months, so I'm taking into account all the the possibilities and considerations regarding that, this is the goal of creating this thread; to get as much info and help as possible from people who know these things (like you, Anthony).

Regards

[anthonyparsons]

Ok, that bounce rate is extremely high. Bounce rate means that these are visitors that are not visiting again, which means something is bringing in traffic that is wrong for you, thus driving your operating costs up as a result vs. converting numbers into sales. If you were using contextual advertising, then traffic is good, however; even for contextual advertising, if the traffic isn't around the topic that the page relates and in a design / layout that gets a majority of new traffic atleast reading that page to click through with contextual ads in order to create revenue, then that is also a waste.

A high bounce rate means, Total Unique Visitors that hit your site and leave, to not return again within that months period to be measured as a repeat visitor. So of your 33,974 unique monthly visits, 20384 approximately were a total waste off time being attracted in the first place.

You can get marketing lessons though at plenty of places on the web from reputable people. Just visit digitalpoint forums or SEO Book forums.

[Ahmed]

OK, thanks Anthony.

About the host plan, After you see my statistics what do you thing the minimum requirements (CPU, RAM, HDD, Traffic/Bandwidth, ... etc) a good host should have whether it is VPC or dedicated?

Do you think the following plan is good enough for a site like mine?:

AMD Athlon 2000+
512 MB DDR RAM
40 Gigs Hard Drive
1400 GB Monthly Traffic (non Cogent)
100 Mbps Connection

Or I'll need a better one?

Thanks

[anthonyparsons]

AMD Athlon 2000+ is just about at the bottom of the entire CPU benchmark test scores... complete and total rubbish.

You need to do your homework if your switching systems. It usually comes down to budget. If you have the knowledge to run your own VPS without management, then Linode. If not, ServInt.

[Ahmed]

OK, I'll give it some thought.
I'll get back to this thread when I have something in mind to ask about!

Thanks again, Anthony.

Of course any other suggestions or ideas from anyone are more than welcome!

Regards!

[ryan1918]

OK, thanks Anthony.

About the host plan, After you see my statistics what do you thing the minimum requirements (CPU, RAM, HDD, Traffic/Bandwidth, ... etc) a good host should have whether it is VPC or dedicated?

Do you think the following plan is good enough for a site like mine?:

AMD Athlon 2000+
512 MB DDR RAM
40 Gigs Hard Drive
1400 GB Monthly Traffic (non Cogent)
100 Mbps Connection

Or I'll need a better one?

Thanks

You should really check me out, your server specs are way too long to host almost any sites, 512 mb of ram is not acceptable as apache will eat almost all that up with not many connections..

Here are my server stats.

Intel Quad Core Xeon 3220 - 4 x 2.40GHz

• 2 x 500GB HDD
• 12GB RAM
• 1 GigE (1000Mbit) dedicated port
• 100TB monthly transfer outgoing - IN unmetered

[syrus.xl]

I am running a VPS with my own vBulletin Suite, and I have numerous other accounts running IPB forums and custom scripts. As for speed, it is very good, it is not an Apache webserver, it uses LiteSpeed with MemCache enabled. URLjet supplies my VPS, okay they are not cheap compared to other hosts, but they have dedicated vBulletin experts for Technical Support, should you need them. My site is monitored by a 3rd party company and every month is a 100% uptime - they actually state a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

Perhaps, you should give them a call - they will let you know your exact requirements based on your figures for running vBulletin 4 - they do upgrades for free.

[rajubd]

Buy a www.eurovps.com shared hosting. I have run 8000 visitor perday with there shared hosting with just 12£ per month.