When to upgrade to VPS?

When is it time to contemplate moving to VPS? Do you base this on anything like unique visitors a day or bandwidth used?

Thanks.

 

Mainly we needed 3 character searches enabled.

Also the MySql errors became more frequent, and customer support was 'inconsistent' although they did try.

The shared hosting account was frustrating the members enough to where they would go to other places on the internet.

Our vps has fantastic tech support and have never had a 'mysql has gone away' message. I think that is how it was worded, we used to get them 3x a week and have not seen them since the move. It is also blindingly fast, so we are getting more members.

We doubled the amount of people online at any one time. While some of that was attributable to other factors (news events) they tended to stay more than when we were on a shared account.

I'm sure we could have stayed on the shared account for another year if necessary.

 

Slow website. Database errors. Bandwidth errors.

 

Thanks, Abomination.

I'm not getting database or bandwidth errors; the website is just running a little slow (pages are taking longer to load).

What's a "significant" use of bandwidth (in numbers)?

 

I'm not sure how that is relevant because every host and situation is different, but we were in the 15GB / month range which is not much. It had a lot more to do with site performance overall which really was not a bandwidth issue.

One more thing. The shared account has support forums. The moderation in the support forums is a bit bizarre and inconsistent. They just now locked a thread where someone was asking how to open an account with no explanation. I would think that getting new customers would be of interest to the company, and explaining why the thread was locked would keep existing customers informed of the right way to address things like that. Weird.

 

OK, thanks. I just trying to "feel" things out if I need to move up to VPS.

 

I just clicked on the link in your sig. Awesome site + a blog (wordpress?) + a vb forum with 141 people online.

I believe you should be considering a vps. We only have 1 forum, with maybe 40-80 people online, which is almost unmodified and really am glad for the vps.

 

Thanks for your feedback about the site. We still have a few projects to tackle with the website (it just went up this week).

I think when I install vB 4.0.1 Suite, we will definitely have to go to VPS.

 

Good luck with vb4.

All kidding aside that may take more resources than v3, possibly much more.

 

I base it on load times. Anything over about 5 - 8 second loads times, you need to do something.

What everything "something" is, you need to do it - streamline the theme, tone down the images, upgrade the server,,,.

 

Up to 100 users currently online I'd stay with shared webhosting. It depends on your host how much users you can have in the same time. If you always go to new starting webhosts with empty servers you can have several hundred users with the most basic plan.

 

It all comes down to the following:

• The configuration (both hardware and software) of the machine that your account is hosted on.
• The resources utilized by your account (in comparison to what other accounts on the machine are consuming).
• The load that your account (as a sole entity) is placing on the machine and, in turn, how said load is affecting the other shared accounts.

A standard shared account, regardless of the resources delegated (e.g. disk space and bandwith), is always a risk when it comes to maintaining a continuously growing community and/or website without running into problems in the future. As a community grows, the server's resources (e.g. CPU power and RAM usage) are increasingly "stressed" and as such, other accounts on the server will suffer (or, "suffer the consequences"). It's not uncommon for a shared hosting provider to contact you should such a situation arise. If they feel that an individual account is putting an unnatural amount of stress on the machine, they will often suggest alternative solutions that will conform to your needs.

You'll know when it's time to make the move over to a dedicated environment, however it's better to do so sooner rather than later. If the activity levels are truly outstanding, you may also want to consider purchasing a dedicated server (if this is a viable solution for you).

 

Here's some recent stats:

Load times --> 1.51 1.72 1.71
Members Online --> 493 Users Online (28 members and 465 guests)
Bandwidth / Month --> ~5-6 GB

I'm currently hosted on HostGator (shared) and I spoke with them last month regarding a VPS. They stated that a VPS would not help page load times.

What is a ballpark figure for investing into a dedicated server? (Purchased outright vs. monthly, pros and cons, etc.)

Thanks!

 

These are load averages, possibly from you adminCP or cPanel, right?

You will not run any quicker on a hostgator vps than on hostgator shared, unless someone on your shared server is hogging the resources, which was our case.

Running a dedicated server can be a bit daunting. If you are technical enough to run an unmanaged server then you may not be asking the question you asked. I would recommend managed.

Servint has a nice dedicated at about $200/m
Ubiquity might also have something. $160 - $200+. The $160 is really low powered though.
Another option is servint vps. they have several levels and are meant to be dedicated replacements.

Those are my top 2 picks at the moment. They both manage their own equipment and are fully staffed with phone support. Having excellent support cannot be over emphasized.

 

Thanks, Abomination.

 

ServInt is a first class operation by all accounts. I've had issues with Ubiquity before on dedicated hardware (reboot took upwards of 2 hours, for many reasons - access to the facility being one).

 

I have servint at this time, so far so good. They keep mentioning more 'abstraction' layering i.e. cloud storage in their company blogs. Since I don't want my database residing on another machine, and they keep refusing to give details I am updating my list of hosting providers 'just in case'.

Are you saying Ubiquity techs do not have direct access to the servers they operate?

 

I just wanted to touch on your point of Cloud hosting before answering your other question. Cloud Storage isn't a bad thing and can be/is secure if partitioned correctly (NetApp, for example, will allow you to have a single volume per server if so desired). However, irregardless, Virtuozzo will keep other people out of your data (unless of course, the person accessing the data has higher level access, such as a ServInt VZ admin/NOCling). Thus, you could even be on cloud storage right now with them and not even know it since VZ is hiding that portion from you, making it appear to be a local drive to your VM (since all a VZ drive is is a single, large, flat file sitting on some sort of storage device)

Now, onto your question:

They (Ubiquity) do have direct access - but, since they rent space from a larger facility (Switch and Data and the like), they have to deal with access restrictions, etc. imposed on them by the facility and since they operate on an 'on call' basis (at least after normal biz hours) - they may not have the right people with the right access at the right time, every time (this server didn't have KVM/IP else it could have been handled remotely).

Now, I will say that this was probably a less than common occurrence - but, it should be enough to get people to think about what they 'should' expect from their provider in an outage situation (this server was a host node for a commercial company with many VM's running off it).

All of my systems now, without fail, come with either DRAC or IPMI KVM/IP (or some form thereof) which make that a moot point - but still. Food for thought.

 

Thank you for your input on Ubiquity. My distinct impression based on the following, and several other statements on their website lead me to believe they operated, and staffed, their own datacenters. I added the bold part.
The Best Web Hosting - 10 Reasons Ubiquity is the Industry's Top Service Provider

"Managed Hosting" means different things to different people/hosting providers, as you stated.

"Cloud" is several orders of magnitude less defined than Managed Hosting.

When I rent a vps in a datacenter, I'd like to think I rented a vps in a datacenter.

 

That might be true now (this was a few years ago in their New York facility), I can't speak to their current state of operations.

As for renting a VPS in a data center, that's still true - but, the question, as always - whose data center are you actually located in?

Also - remember, a VPS is a Virtual Private Server, which means you're effectively sharing resources among multiple customers on 1 server (while still being isolated) which could just as well mean that you are on rented equipment on a white label agreement with a bigger provider.

However, speaking from my own experience, the company that I work for has a cage in an existing datacenter when we could have gone and built out our own to spec. Why?

Bottom line -- we don't want to have to deal with all of the basics of running a data center and would rather pay someone else to do that for us so we can do what we're good at -- host and maintain websites/servers. That's our core business and as such, would prefer to stay there and not have to deal with all of the rest.

Now, owning your own data center and operating it yourself is very commendable and I give any provider that can claim that kudos - but, in todays market - it's really not something that's required/necessary when there's plenty of good facilities providers out there that you can leverage.

Even in that kind of scenario - most of the time, people don't even need to be at the data center to work on a downed server -- all you need is a decent home (or connection at a call center, as the case may be) connection and a KVM/IP switch or Spider KVM device and you can operate the server as if you were sitting in front of it (of course, if parts need to be replaced then you would need on-site staff).

For my own systems, I can manage them at a BIOS level from anywhere I happen to be in the world -- I don't need to be in any specific location to work on a downed server like some people would like you to believe. I'm sure these companies are using KVM/IP extensively.

Just earlier today, I did an OS reinstall on one of my dev servers -- and I'm about 8000 miles away from the server at the moment - all over the servers DRAC card/connection.

So - while what Ubiquity says might be true -- it's still slightly misleading with all of the out of band technologies that are available now (such as DRAC, IP/KVM, Spider KVM's) - is anyone physically at the server or are they just using one of the methods previously described?