Do I need my VPS or should I downgrade to a standard hosting package?

Discussion in 'Web Hosting' started by fancydressqueen, Oct 2, 2011.

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  1. #1
    I have a Silver VPS with web hosting buzz that costs me $44.99 a month and I only host my 1 business website (found in my signature) along with a few sub domains for a forum and blog. I was having issues with the speed of loading the site and they upgraded me from a standard hosting package to a VPS. The vast majority of my traffic and customers are from the UK but the servers are located in the US.

    I just found that they now offer a UK VPS service and standard hosting in the UK. The Gold standard package is £6.99 a month (check details on the webhostingbuzz.co.uk website) and comes with unlimited bandwidth and disk space. A silver VPS package comes with 1.5GB CPU and 2GB RAM, but its £38.95 a month. CPanel is £6 a month extra (which I use).

    A few questions. Seeing as I only run one site (my online store which gets around 1000 unique visitors a day) do I really need a VPS or am I getting ripped off? Im not sure if I would need additional CPU resources as I can have a lot of people on the site at one time.

    Secondly is it going to benefit me changing to UK based servers as most of my visitors come from the UK?
     
    Last edited: Oct 2, 2011
    fancydressqueen, Oct 2, 2011 IP
  2. The Stealthy One

    The Stealthy One Well-Known Member Affiliate Manager

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    #2
    Do you have any way right now to measure your CPU usage? This would definitely be useful info to see. Another consideration would be that if you do indeed need a VPS, perhaps there's a more affordable provider than WebHostingBuzz that you can choose which won't compromise on the quality you need.

    It's hard to answer your base question as to whether or not you could just use shared hosting, but I would guess no. Since you had trouble with shared hosting before, there's no reason to think things would be any different now.
     
    The Stealthy One, Oct 2, 2011 IP
  3. fancydressqueen

    fancydressqueen Member

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    #3
    Many thanks for the response. I presume if I contact my host they can provide the CPU usage details?

    I quickly did some research and agree that reverting back to the shared hosting would be a no no, so a VPS is the way to go on. Im also a creature of habit so changing to a different company would probably be a nightmare for me, so chances are ill stick with webhostingbuzz. The customer service is great and I don't have anything to compare the VPS speed to as it's the only one ive used.

    I presume that hosting on UK servers would benefit my speed though?
     
    fancydressqueen, Oct 2, 2011 IP
  4. sambling

    sambling Well-Known Member Affiliate Manager

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    #4
    Downgrade, downgrade, downgrade $45 per month is way too much to be paying to host 1 site.
     
    sambling, Oct 2, 2011 IP
  5. fancydressqueen

    fancydressqueen Member

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    #5
    Any recommendations of where I should look to instead please?
     
    fancydressqueen, Oct 2, 2011 IP
  6. WSWD

    WSWD Well-Known Member

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    #6
    I can't offer any suggestions in the UK, Ms. Dressqueen, but I would suggest moving your hosting to the UK. You technically want your server closest to your visitors for the best performance, since the information will take less time to reach them.

    1,000 visitors per day is not an excessive amount of visitors for shared hosting, but it really depends on your site and what it is using in the form of resources...CPU being the most important.

    That said, VPSs also isolate you to an extent from other idiots on the server. You have dedicated resources for your VPS as well.
     
    WSWD, Oct 2, 2011 IP
  7. MrJohn

    MrJohn Well-Known Member

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    #7
    If you are able I would keep things on the VPS. That way you are going to have even more room to grow when your business starts to take off even more. I think you would miss some of the benefits of the VPS once you switch to Shared Hosting.
     
    MrJohn, Oct 3, 2011 IP
  8. sambling

    sambling Well-Known Member Affiliate Manager

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    #8
    It really depends on your experience. More= You can go cheaper. If you go to virpus.com in their budget plans they have some good plans on their biggest 3. You could add full management for $10 p/m or not. Look here for their terms on getting cpanel for free: http://virpus.com/standalone/promotions.html

    That may save you between $10- $20 per month (as long as you are paying months in advance)
     
    sambling, Oct 3, 2011 IP
  9. sparek

    sparek Peon

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    #9
    It depends on what speed is being referred to here (and there's really no way for you to know). If your current host is in the USA and you are located in the UK, then latency is going to be at least somewhat of an issue. Assuming everything is routed properly, a server located in your same town (or closer to you) is going to load faster, latency-wise, than a server that is located across the country or across the world. For UK to USA, does this really affect the speed of your server? There's really no way of telling. Perhaps if your USA server is located on the west coast, then it has to span the Atlantic Ocean, and then the entire continental US.

    Then there is a speed issue related to the specifications and load of the server you are on. An old 386 processor server is going to load your website slower (a lot slower!) than the new age Xeon processors for Intel. Hard drives usage comes into play too, if you're doing heavy database queries or loading a lot of images, a RAID10 array of hard drives is going to perform faster than a single SATA drive. And the number of accounts on a server, or even a VPS node, can affect the overall quality of performance of that server.

    If the speed issue you are facing is latency related, then having your account on a server in the UK (or perhaps the east coast of the USA) would help. If most of your visitors are UK based, then having a UK based webhost will no doubt give you and your visitors the best performance in terms of latency.

    If the speed issue is related to the specifications of the server your account is on, then simply switching servers (some webhosts may have other servers to move you to) or switching webhosting providers may provide the best solution.

    A lot has been made recently about VPSs. The honest truth is, for some, you can get better performance on a high quality shared hosting server than compared to a cheap budget VPS. Just because a VPS costs more and maybe isolates you more, doesn't mean that the underlying hardware on that VPS node gives you any additional benefit. But it could be that your website was overloading the shared hosting server you were on and moving you to a VPS, isolates you from the other shared hosting customers on that shared hosting server. You overloading that shared hosting server was affecting their performance so your host moved you to a VPS in an attempt to keep everybody happy.
     
    sparek, Oct 3, 2011 IP
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