It obviously depends on your package and limitations, but generally speaking, what type of speed increase would one observe when going from a VPS to a hardware dedicated server? Is it a minute or substantial difference?
Generally, the difference is substantial. As mentioned, it does indeed depend on the VPS package being used - they can be limited when it comes to the amount of RAM available per virtual machine.
Yep, VPS are normally very RAM limited, which can cause a lot of paging (and hence slowness). Both our servers have 4GB RAM, and so the swap file is hardly used.
There is a LOT of difference between a vps and dedicated server. I wish I would have changed to a dedicated server a long time ago. But instead, I tried to squeeze the most out that vps that I could. And as a result, I might have lost a lot of members.
We stopped experiencing server too busy errors and have all of our processing power and memory; definitely worth it.
The memory usage is something that I can see becoming an issue at a specific point in time - it's something that is used up rather quickly, and when it is, all accounts hosted on the server can feel the "pain".
for the most forums and web/ftp/mail-server-only projects are VDS totally sufficient. I've never seen or administrated a community which had to be hosted on a dedicated root server due lack of performance. it mostly depends on how obliging your hoster is, when you see that you're running out of space (problem #1) to order an additional harddrive.
lot more to it than the HDD I've seen forums outgrow a single dedicated... mysql can take a little power
