Hi all, some information:
www.berlingoforum.co.uk
Medium sized forum, growing at a nice rate with around 12,000 posts, 1000 members and growing.
Currently hosted in the US (UK Membership Base) on shared hosting.
Now i know i could just google VPS vs Shared, which i have, but i wanted some tailored views from a forum with opinions i respect.
Would i benefit from going to a VPS? What sort of specs if so.
Would there be a noticable speed difference bringing the hosting to the UK?
Thanks in advanced as always.
Unless you can afford a high quality VPS I wouldn't go for one (yet). But I would suggest you moved hosts towards
http://valcatohosting.com I've been with them for a bit and the experiance cannot be better. I use the small package (because that's all I need). Each shared plan comes with SSH access, unlimited bandwidth and 1 free domain (how can you go wrong??). I
highly recommend them.
(just a hint to save you frustration in the future they have symlinks disabled in htaccess so if you go with them remove FollowSymLinks from the top line in htaccess)
Are you confident for a VPS? If you have the time and will, it's always the better choice.
(2011-11-11, 02:25 AM)Aristotle Wrote: [ -> ]Are you confident for a VPS? If you have the time and will, it's always the better choice.
That's another thing I forgot. A VPS is very time consuming. You need to install everything, make sure it's secure and constantly tweak things. I'd say you go to valcato.
If you know what you are doing and use a good VPS provider you will usually get better performance and be able to handle more traffic for less or the same price as shared hosting. If you don't know how to run a server properly, go for shared hosting until you have to upgrade to a VPS or dedicated server.
I suggest you VPS server because if your traffic increases, shared servers, suspend your account due to high resources usage and it can hurts your ranking on search engines. So its better to choose a VPS for this forum to be sure about it.
Neither.
When the time has come to upgrade, go cloud.
When that is, is kinda depending on a few things.. the size of your database,and the number of people online. Keep an eye on page generation times. When those are rising too much during peak hours, it might be time to upgrade your hosting. There are things you can do to stay longer on shared, like reducing queries, removing shoutbox (shoutbox is bad idea anyways imho), innodb changes, etc.
I don't really recommend VPS for a growing forum, looking back at my own experiences, and wish i would have gone cloud directly (there are plans starting from $50-60 with Cpanel, fully managed, the same you would pay for a good VPS.) Upgrading to a larger server (even when needed only for a day) is click and go.
Go with a good host, not with a cheap host. I can really recommend
http://www.stormondemand.com/
(2011-11-11, 07:59 AM)Disturbed Wrote: [ -> ]I don't really recommend VPS for a growing forum, looking back at my own experiences, and wish i would have gone cloud directly (there are plans starting from $50-60 with Cpanel, fully managed, the same you would pay for a good VPS.) Upgrading to a larger server (even when needed only for a day) is click and go.
$50/month is over half of what I pay per year for my VPS, but it does not include and I don't want cPanel or management. If I used cPanel I'd need more ram to run the inefficient software (such as Apache) cPanel requires. Why should I pay $10-15/month for something to configure free software?
(2011-11-13, 04:34 PM)dmmcintyre3 Wrote: [ -> ] (2011-11-11, 07:59 AM)Disturbed Wrote: [ -> ]I don't really recommend VPS for a growing forum, looking back at my own experiences, and wish i would have gone cloud directly (there are plans starting from $50-60 with Cpanel, fully managed, the same you would pay for a good VPS.) Upgrading to a larger server (even when needed only for a day) is click and go.
$50/month is over half of what I pay per year for my VPS, but it does not include and I don't want cPanel or management. If I used cPanel I'd need more ram to run the inefficient software (such as Apache) cPanel requires. Why should I pay $10-15/month for something to configure free software?
cPanel is nowhere near free...
(2011-11-13, 04:41 PM)Jason L. Wrote: [ -> ] (2011-11-13, 04:34 PM)dmmcintyre3 Wrote: [ -> ] (2011-11-11, 07:59 AM)Disturbed Wrote: [ -> ]I don't really recommend VPS for a growing forum, looking back at my own experiences, and wish i would have gone cloud directly (there are plans starting from $50-60 with Cpanel, fully managed, the same you would pay for a good VPS.) Upgrading to a larger server (even when needed only for a day) is click and go.
$50/month is over half of what I pay per year for my VPS, but it does not include and I don't want cPanel or management. If I used cPanel I'd need more ram to run the inefficient software (such as Apache) cPanel requires. Why should I pay $10-15/month for something to configure free software?
cPanel is nowhere near free...
He meant "free software" as in Apache, MySQL, etc.