Is there anything that will happen that can make us shift to VPS? My friend said that site will start getting slow, and when there are a lot of users online at your VB forum, you may have to switch to vps. My Teen Forum is consuming sorta 30-40GB b/w per month and I am on shared hosting yet. I get few complains from some who are using IE, that site runs slow. Please check and help me - teenhut.net Is the site slow and should I go for VPS or its no use and some other problem.
Generally, when you have a site that is doing well and gaining a lot of traffic/bandwidth you move away from shared hosting. VPS is probably the optimal next step. You may also want to consider getting a reseller account which depending on the webhost may be a dedicated server but without the system access level of a VPS.
dedicated ( root ) servers are excellent - but they also require far more knowledge/control and skills by owner hence it is a math question - business math 1. how much your adsense a switch to dedicated server only makes sense if you are clearly above 1k$/month - nearer 2k/m 2. how is your adsense POTENTIAL - in your case medium because teens have limited buying power and thus limited generic potential to actually convert any click in to conversion for advertisers - unless you get ads with lots of free stuff ... and LOW eCPM in your case most likely you could improve / optimize adsense as it is now 3. most important the number of visitors - the higher the number of visitors the higher your revenue potential to cover/secure additional time/$ investments looking at your alexa data - your visitors/traffic still is way down - no need to change servers at such low traffic the fact that you have high GB simply means that you may offer too many large photos compared to your number of visitors and revenue to speed up server you may use reduced image size or compress more to reduce server load my recommendation before changing server would be adsense revenue at least between 1000-2000 $ /m 5000 or more unique visitors daily this above for at least 2-3 months steady - then its time to upgrade dedicated server also means more time ot monitor, more to learn, etc it also means more fun, total control, better revenue options because you have zero limits of any kind - you create your own TOS to fully optimize your site
Generally, my question to you is are you confident in managing your own server ? If so then the VPS option may not be a bad one. If not, continue with the shared hosting for now and if you want, your option may be to move to a web host which may not be overselling too much. Try to also stay away from web host which uses only Cogent as their bandwidth provider.
thats exactly what happened to me oct 2006 - my previous host informed me of too much CPU/resources being used by me ... I was using 45 GB / m and a total of about 2% of my accounts limits my host gave me 4 weeks - hours later changed it to 2 weeks to get dedicated server - i got one but on new host in EU thats the hard way to learn swimming but I'd never want to go back to shared hosting too many benefits of having root server