Hi, i'm currently using startlogic Prologic which is $5.95 a month. I have a couple of sites hosted under a same account. However, on one of my websites (a networking site with a lot of plugins), it loads pretty slowly sometimes, and this is a new website without any traffic. So I'm thinking to upgrade to their VPS hosting which cost from 29.95, 39.95 and 49.95 a month (3 plans). http://www.startlogic.com/startlogic/virtualserver.bml My question is what is the biggest advantage of VPS hosting? Will my website be a lot faster as that is my main need? Let's say I if have 1000 users unique users a day, will the $5.95 be enough? If not, which vps plan will suit me the best. And what if I have 10,000 unique a day? Thanks.
As a personal consumer here's what my experience has been. With shared hosting / cheap 5-10 dollar a month hosting the more they offered unlimited HD space the more I tend to stay away from that kind of hosting. Such hosts obviously do use high performance servers and cram thousands of clients on server box to profit. Therefore...you're playing the odds. Obviously there are more sites out there that are either being built, under construction, never take off, or only accessed by the webmaster and one or two of his / her friends at a time...you typically won't get something major hosted on let's say Bluehost.com...(that will stay hosted there anyways)...but out of those 1000 plus sites someone starts to do something that throws the memory off whack. It could be running to many mysql scripts...cron jobs...who knows...you really end up being out of the loop and it's out of your hands. A VPS is good if you enter a situation where you start to lose control...I understand we all think our site's will have high hopes...high hits...etc..but only upgrade when you need to. I see a VPS as a stepping stone towards a dedicated server...and if you don't see yourselves ever needing your own dedicated server..then why bother with a VPS? Long story short...the shared hosting solution / cheap solution is always a coin flip...you might be fine with 1000 views a day...you might lag like crazy with just yourself viewing your site because of the other site's using up all your resources.
Thanks for the advice. Here are a couple more questions if you don't mind. How many sites does a VSP hosting host? And what is the difference between VPS and dedicated server? I assume you are saying that VSP hosting is a lot faster than the regular one since there won't be 1000 sites hosted on the same server? The main problem I have with right now is that my site sometimes takes me 2 minutes to login, sometimes it takes only 2-3 seconds and I'm the only user on that site right now. If this problem persists, I doubt I will get any user to stay on my site if it takes him too long to load. Also, how easy it is to upgrade from regular to VPS?
I think the main advantage of VPS hosting is: you know your all limits. That is the main advantage i believe. And you are independent as if you are using dedicated server.
The problem you are facing is due to less RAM, u need to upgrade your RAM and it shall work fine. Also another factor is the CPU usage.As you said your site is not having any visitors (since its in development stage) so you need to check how much RAM/CPU usages your all sites are having and then upgrade as required.
What do you get for 60$/month? I have 256MB Guaranteed RAM for 15$/month + lots of space&bandwidth for your money you must have at least 1GB?
With a VPS, you have total control over how many accounts you put on. Speed of your VPS depends on many things. The infrastructure of the provider is key. If they have good network connectivity, your server will respond faster and pages will load quicker. If they also overload/oversell the VPS node, that could end up slowing you down as well. If you decide to go with a VPS, make sure you get a managed server, or, use someone else to manage your server, as they are many things you need to do from the back end in order to ensure your server is up and ready for business. There are a couple of things here. The first one, is that unless you get a managed service, you are responsible to the uptime of your VPS. If the node goes down, then its the providers responsibility. This does happen, as a VPS is a server being controlled by another server. A VPS can be faster, but, that depends on what is slowing it down now. Is the server running out of resources, and thus queuing tasks, which would then slow page loads down, or, is the network the server is connected to being throttled, or, is just plain slow.
If the VPS you purchase doesn't have enough resources, you can always upgrade to next plan fairly instant.