I know nothing about hosting and am basically building my own site consisting of about five static pages,a blog, a web app written in perl,by a programmer and maybe a forum. Because of the app my blog will hopefully be very linkworthy. My biggest fear after all my hard work is that a popular blog will mention me and my site will get pulled if I have shared hosting. MY questions are: how easy is it to upgrade from a shared hosting account to a vps hosting? Also do hosting companies offer true managed solutions for vps or do I have to hite someone to configure the vps for me. I tried to get an answer to these questions, using google, but the hosting companies domoinate all the search results and I don't trust them totally. Like they all say unlimited bandwidth and even I know thats a load of bollocks. Thanks for any advice on this matter. Cheers Don BTW I will be hosting with hostgator probably and I don't mind paying for vps if I HAVE to
Hi Donza, You have a very legitimate concern. If you become too popular, the shared hosts are going to pull you. Upgrading from a shared account to a VPS is simple, even more so if both are running cPanel or another control panel. Speaking of which, if you plan on using cPanel/WHM, a VPS can be quite easy to manage. However, if you don't know much about servers/server administration, it probably is your best bet to go with managed services. Yes, VPS companies do offer managed services. In fact, most VPS companies come in one of 3 forms of server management: Unmanaged, Semi-Managed, Fully-Managed. Hostgator does indeed offer fully-managed VPS. They should take care of all the configuration for you if you ask them to.
Thanks a lot. That's a really good advice, and I will be using a managed vps with cpanel. Probably won't even need it but I'd rather be safe for sorry and it's not like I'm locked into a contract. Cheers Don
I had similar concern, I had few huge sites on ONE shared plan at HG, so I thought it is time to move one step forward so I took unmanaged VPS. This get so bad decision and a nightmare. VPS is a just slice of the server, so be careful with it, you have control over everything but DO YOU really need to know every process on your machine? It consumes too much time, sometimes is shared much better solution.
Hi, What were the main problems you had? And when you say huge, how big is huge? I thought once a site got resonably big it got throttled back by the hosting company Any advice on this would be much appreciated. Cheers Don
I don't think you should get a vps just get a shared account with beefy LIMITS (DONT BUY UNLIMITED) and even if your blog is really popular it won't get taken down. Actually vps's usually offer less resources in terms of bandwidth and disk space.
Main problem was, whole VPS was down a lot of times. I don't know really reasons, but sometimes it was spam account created under account, then some sites were consuming too much RAM, I have tested few times, and those reported as a problem are still working fine on shared after I transferred immediately. Maybe VPS configuration wasn't good, I don't know, but as I say, if you have free time to explore every little detail and to babysitting it, then take it, if not...then think about another solution.
RW1210, If sites under your account are spamming you're going to have problems no matter where you go. There is no provider (shared or VPS) that is going to put up with that. Unless the shared folk really don't care about resource usage, there is no way you're going to be allowed to use more resources on shared hosting than you are on a VPS, where your RAM, for example, is dedicated to your account only. It doesn't make sense.
It would be an easy task for hosting company to just switch / upgrade your account from shared to VPS without much efforts put in it. A bit mess when a first set up was begin but the rest should be ok. VPS need a basic knowledge to make them work properly. If you cannot get it done yourself then most of major companies are keen to offer you an administrator with a little fees. It is reasonable enough.