Shared hosting vs. VPS vs. Dedicated server

My commercial website has been hosted at GoDaddy for over 12 years but their service become so bad that I have no choice but to relocate it somewhere.

I am considering hosting on VPS or dedicated server as opposed to shared hosting. I have absolutely no experience with setting up or managing web servers, so my apology in advance if these questions sound stupid to you

1. How much effort is involved in setting up web server on VPS or dedicated box? I checked this post "Complete Newbie Guide To Build CentOS Server To Host Websites" but it is hard for me to estimate:
- what skills I should be looking for when hiring somebody to do this job?
- how many hours of work this setup (web server, mail server, etc.) is going to take for an experienced developer?
- what are the current rates for a person with these skills (and fluent English)?

2. Assuming I want the same level of maintenance and security as reputable web hosting can provide, how much regular ongoing maintenance work is involved here?

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If you can share your experience with switching from shared hosting to VPS or dedicated server, that would be greatly appreciated.

The main reason I am considering VPS or dedicated is that I want to get very low page loading time and, specifically, TTFB (time to first byte) for my target market in Ontario, Canada. I don't want to use CDN (e.g. CloudFlare) as these are known to negatively affect SERP - there are too many spammers utilizing CDNs and Google punishes you for being in the same network segment as they are. It is very far-fetched assumption for Google algorithms, but that's how they work - after spending 3 years of my life dealing with machine learning I can perfectly understand the reasons for such behaviour

 

If you go with a managed VPS and use WHM/cPanel, from your perspective it will be very similar to using shared hosting. It will be easy and will not require outside assistance. WHM/cPanel will manage the server for you and if you get into any trouble you submit a support ticket and support will handle it for you provided you stay close to a default setup (which should be more than fine for most).

Unless you are highly experienced managing a server, I would not recommend going with an unmanaged VPS or unmanaged dedicated server. First stop is usually the VPS and you move to a dedicated when your traffic or resource needs require more power.

If you go with a managed host and WHM/cPanel and keep a default setup, very little ongoing maintenance will be required. Security updates will be installed by WHM/cPanel and if you run into problems, you submit a support ticket and support will take care of it for you.

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Using WHM/cPanel, I found very little difference between a VPS and shared using cPanel. After logging into WHM to create a cPanel account, it was a matter of uploading files, creating a database and user and uploading the SQL file. It was easy to get up and running.

You are completely wasting your time on that first byte issue. Nobody is going to notice a 1/10th of a second difference in first byte time. WHM/cPanel are designed for ease of use, not high performance. So if you want to spend hours and hours and hours of your time (or lots of money if you hire someone), you can optimize your server and save that 1/10th or 2/10ths of a second in first byte time. Is it worth it? Such optimization is useful when the server is under heavy load as it will prevent upgrading or going to multi server system. Otherwise, it is a waste of time.

I have never heard of that before and I am sure many will argue that point.

 

Thanks billzo, I'll investigate WHM/cPanel.
I disagree with your comment re TTFB, from personal experience I found this to be quite significant.

Here is one of the posts on this topic: https://forums.digitalpoint.com/thr...udflare-instant-drop-in-seo-pictures.2688419/

 

If time to first byte is that important to you, then you might want to go with as big of a dedicated server as you can find with a nginx front end (at least to serve static assets like jpg, css, js, etc) because of every benchmark I have read, Apache cannot match nginx in terms of speed. It all depends on how much time and effort you want to devote to something nobody will notice.

Google drops traffic all the time. I had a site go from #1 to buried under 500 in a matter of hours for no reason (same thing happened to my competitors weeks earlier, this was back in 2008). I have also noticed a correlation between the number of pages Google has indexed and traffic. As Google crawls and adds to its index, traffic tends to go up. When Google drops some pages from its index (as it does periodically for whatever reason), traffic tends to drop.

There are all kinds of theories about IP ranges, Google discriminating against IP addresses that also host adult content or are close to spammer IP addresses. Fact is that Google does not disclose its ranking algorithm at all. If one event occurs after another event, especially when it comes to Google, that does not mean the first event caused the second. Google drops traffic all the time.

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=traffic+dropped+from+google

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6033388?hl=en&ref_topic=6033383

I find the theories humorous at times. Like a voodoo curse.

This is a bit old, but probably still relevant (from Google's anti spam engineer):

https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/myth-busting-virtual-hosts-vs-dedicated-ip-addresses/

 

@op, there are always premium hosts, that charge more, but can likely solve your problem. Liquidweb is one, they charge $15 per month, but in comparison a fully managed cpanel VPS with 1024mb of ram might cost you $50 per month.

The next issue I wanted to mention is the size of the VPS to choose. Some people see VPS for $2-$5 and think this is suitable for them. In fact, I have seen people cry that they were unable to run cpanel on a 128mb ram vps. The bare minimum that I would use for cpanel for running a very important site is around 700mb ram, but realistically you should be looking for around 1024mb of ram to start off with. Make sure that you find a provider that will let you scale up your resources when you need them.

Now the reason I recommend going for a fully managed service, (opposed to doing it yourself) is that you want someone 24/7 to manage and maintain the server security as well as they can provide you the support you are used to from a shared host.

This is not really a recommendation, but rather just an example, if you check out wiredtree, they have fully managed cpanel VPS, that is pure SSD raid 10, with 2gb ram, for around $55 a month. If load time is critical for you, you really should be chasing the SSD drives. You can speed up your server again by using lightspeed (+ $12 at wiredtree) + varnish.

To be honest, its arguable that some things might not make a noticeable difference at all. I have never heard that using a CDN is a bad thing, as even this forum uses one.

 

matt_62, thanks a lot for confirming my findings. I spend almost 8 hours today reading reviews and testing different parameters and zeroed down on Liquidweb and Wiredtree

 

I can vouch for WiredTree. They are a great managed VPS provider.

 

Depending on how big your website it, it might not be absolutely necessary to make the leap to utilizing a VPS or Dedicated Server. It is however recommended that you do not utilize any of those big name companies, as they work their best to make sure they can fit the most possible customers on each piece of hardware. Godaddy has not been a recommended hosting provider for some time, and there are a lot of shared hosts out there that can offer you a solution that would probably benefit you more.

 

If you have no experience with vps or dedicated it is not a bad idea to start with shared hosting. If you site is large enough I can recommend ramnode for managed vps hosting. that way you dont have to pay for someone to set up your server for you. it comes with the package

 

Both VPS and shared hosting
1. Allow single server to provide services for multiple users.
2. Offer low cost alternative to dedicated hosting.
3. Provide the facility to create compartments for files and services from other user’s files and services.