Hello All, I would really appreciate if anyone could please tell me what is VPS hosting ? and the differences b/w the Shared, VPS and Dedicated Hosting Plans ? I have a community forum website on hostgator's shared hosting account.. They say unlimited space and bandwidth and all.. currently I get 200 visitors/day.. but my concern is that my site will get down if I get more visitors.. Therefore I need your kind opinion in this regard. and I was wondering what is the maximum number of visitors a shared hosting account can handle ? I am sure I will be able to get 5000+/unique visitors per day. I don't think it can handle that for a community website where visitors will upload pictures, files etc... So Could you please advise which is the best hosting plan for me? so that I don't experience any down time, the server should be fast and can be search engine friendly. and what measures I can take if I see that my website visitors will exceed the 5000 uv/day?
5,000 visitors should be no problem at all for a shared hosting account. Does depend on exactly how much resources the forum does use though. VPS is a virtualized server, basically like a dedicated server but you have a portion of the system resources. I'd recommend you stay with shared hosting as you're not talking about high traffic usage at all. Hostgator though... not sure about that. Maybe try one of the reputable hosting providers such as geekstorage.com etc. where you'll get proper service and technical support.
Since forum is very database intensive, I would recommend VPS for you, go with at least 768 MB or 1 GB RAM.
VPS has the greatest advantage of security and customizable control on comparing Shared hosting. But it seems to be an expensive hosting technique. You can try www.hioxindia.com to have a cheap and reliable solution on VPS hosting.
Yeah under your circumstances it may be a good idea to go right to VPS. I wouldn't really recommend a dedicated server though as that's just overkill right now, unless you plan on expanding very very fast. But you could always move to it later. But you're right, most shared providers will be able to handle a lot of customers to your website. A couple of my sites are able to handle 8k UV per day on a shared platform without any issues. Most "unlimited" shared providers usually put a red flag on your account if you're over 25GB in disk space though. Not that they will shut you down or anything though, but just to say that this account may be an abuser and that they're probably hosting a lot of video files or images as storage on their servers.
5000 hits per day I dont think a vps would handle that brother you should go with low ended dedicated resources , Why take chance with VPS
Go with vps as you get more visitors then you will get a unique ip which will help your google ranking. You can get some pretty cheap ones for not much more than you pay now- of course you would have to switch.