New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Thoughts on VPS vs. Shared
Joelrockbottomhosts
Member
Hey everyone. So, I run several (4 - 5) websites on a single shared host. A few of the sites have had increased traffic over the past few months, though concurrent users is still probably relatively low. I've noticed some degradation in performance, and started thinking about a VPS. The issue is, I'm not a developer, just someone who can set up shared stuff through cPanel, install and modify Wordpress sites, etc. I certainly can't do security stuff, etc, on an un-managed VPS. Hence, I was thinking of just sticking with the shared host, despite their lack of upgrades. A managed VPS is out of the budget, unless there is some wicked cheap options I am not currently aware of. Thoughts?
Comments
For the most part setting up your own cpanel or kloxo node is really easy and 99.99% of all issues can be googled.
Have you thought of going with a different shared hosting provider, might find better performance with a higher quality host. Another option is getting a VPS + a cPanel license, but that'll increase your costs by quite a bit.
Yea I mean, I've used cPanel and am proficient with it, but I worry about server security or more technical things like that. I hadn't considered a different shared host - do you know of any that have like...different tiers kind of like a VPS?
I haven't seen any explicitly sell high(er) resource plans, but if performance is bad, and you don't have a lot of visitors or high resource using scripts it's most likely the node that's a bit slow.
I suppose the biggest question to ask yourself is "Do I want to learn how to manage a server?". If you've got the desire to do it, then you should have no problems - there are plenty of resources available for help. If the websites are super important (like, you earn your living from your websites), then you may not want to. Or you might want to learn first by moving one site, then move everything over once you've got a handle on it. It's really not that hard to run a server of your own.
Managing a server is not exactly an easy task. However, you will learn more quickly by moving from a shared host to a vps.
NickM nailed it. Running anything of value on a VPS means becoming a sysadmin.
Shared hosting scales just fine, until you get to CPU- or memory-intensive stuff. Tons of connections aren't the problem, nor even is tons of disk...to take an example, at one point I had 130GB of content on Dreamhost shared and they didn't mind; someone on WHT had 1.1TB and they didn't care.
On the other hand, a busy forum, a wordpress blog that active or plugin-happy, etc. might be too much for shared.
What does your shared provider say? Really, 20 or 50 blogs or low-concurrency sites shouldn't tax a shared hosting account.
Yea, NickM's point is well taken. It's not really a matter of desire, but a matter of aptitude. I started my career as a developer, and I just wasn't very good! So, I don't know that it's the right choice for me. I suppose I should ask my host if there is anything they can do to bump performance. I wish there were shared hosts that offered different tiers, I would certainly take advantage of it.
Shared hosting is so oversaturated that it's unlikely you'll even find a slow host. For example, we've been doing shared hosting since like 2002 or so, but our VPS business started last year has ourpaced our shared business.
Another point:
For your $3.49 on shared hosting: Unlimited storage (within reason) and 200 gigabytes of transfer hosted on a 8, 12, or 16 core Opteron with 24+ gb of ram and RAID 10 disk array method, maintained, optimized, and secured by someone who's been doing it for a long time.
For your $4.49 on a VPS: 10gb of storage space, 200 gigabytes of transfer, on a 4-or-less-core system with 256mb of ram and disk i/o pool that's shared with other VPS clients. You mentioned that you don't know what you're doing at this point, so this 1). creates a security issue for you and your information, 2). creates a security issue for me and our clients, and 3). you'll need to learn to optimize your services to run in your allotted resources. Not a job for everyone.
And to be honest, we're hosting quite a few popular forums, and they say it's the best hosting they've had, with no lagginess for the rest of our clients. It's all about the setup and the optimization.
You can get VPS pretty cheap now and so it is a real competitor to shared hosting, that said it really comes down to what hardware etc. your shared host/VPS is running.