Hello. I need to move my site from a shared account to VPS, dedicated, or cloud service and I'm not sure which route is best!? My current site demands/requirements per month: 60-70 GB bandwidth per month 500,000 visits 3,000,000 pageviews 6,000,000 hits outbound traffic 517 kb/s, average 350 kb/s 8 GB files hosted (15,000 files) 10 emails 11 addon domains and subdomains LAMP server Cpanel / phpmyadmin dedicated ip cron jobs currently CPU throttling is 6 minutes every 24 hours, which I want to reduce to zero. googlebot (66.249.68.185) alone sucks up 1 GB of my bandwidth per month (which I dislike) I'm wondering about maxcdn.com, amazon dynamoDB, or hostrocket? not sure if VPN, cloud, or dedicated is best? Reason I haven't scaled up yet is because I previously had a dedicated server from a company and it was slower and had older hardware than my current shared host. Here's what the site is currently running on from a $20/month hostmonster (shared) account: This is a 2U chassis that provides motherboards for 4 separate customer servers. 8x AMD Opteron-6274 16Core (Processor) 1x Super Micro AS -2122TG-HTRF (Chassis, Motherboard, Heatsinks) 16x 8 GB DDR3-1600 ECC / REG (Memory) 12x Western Digital Velociraptor- WD1500BLFS (Hard Drives) 8x OCZ Daneva II's 240GB (SSD Drives) 4x LSI 9285-8e or 9280-8e depending on availability (Sata Controller) 4x LSIBBU09 (Controller Battery) Storage Array 2x External JBOD Chassis- 4u 45Bay SAS (Chassis) 90x 2TB Hitach 3.5" (Hard Drives) I don't know anything about Unix or how to install/manage updates and hackers, etc. so I don't want to get super expensive on something that I can't even manage and is slower than my current host, but I want something lightning quick and is flexible enough to allow me to email subscribers without hassle of getting banned, and scalable if it grows . And don't want to spend lots of money either. I'd love to hear any suggestions! Thanks!
Some of these companies are owned by the same umbrella host company and I know there's a lot of people marketing their own host businesses on here, so I'm also wary of that. Has anyone used Amazon hosting services? I wonder if cloud hosting is faster than a dedicated server?
I think anything over 1 GB of RAM is way overkill for your site. I've run a Linode VPS with 768 MB RAM that had about 550,000 page views per day and it was perfectly fine. That said, I don't know for sure because I'm not sure what your site runs, but with those traffic levels it should not need something extravagant to run well. The most likely problem with your current hosting is that other clients on that box are sucking up all the resources.
I understand the 100% uptime via the cloud, but is it slower than dedicated? If so, we're comparing 99.9% uptime vs. 100% uptime. And having a site that loads 50% slower, for instance, would not worth the 0.1% uptime. I'm totally making these stats up to give an idea of the information I seek. I haven't found anything online yet or anyone who has used both and can vouch for one or another. Thanks Ghan_04, that's helpful. My site is nearly 100% mysql driven, through every page. I know the kneejerk response is to say get a dedicated box, but I know from experience that I had slower & poorer performance from a dedicated box in the past. It's the other factors affecting speed I want to know about. It's throttled 6 min. per day, so that doesn't seem like much I'm losing from other users sucking bandwidth in the way I interpret it?
> I understand the 100% uptime via the cloud, but is it slower than dedicated? We really need to dispel some of the myths about cloud hosting here. I've used two true cloud setups in the past - Gigenet Cloud and Softlayer Cloud. My experience with Gigenet was uptime much less than 100% and with both of them, performance was much slower than dedicated. Here are some likely reasons as to why: True cloud setups like these run with a large SAN where they place tons of customers (all of them if they only have one) and this tends to really give the I/O a huge performance hit. My testing on both Gigenet and Softlayer showed I/O performance much slower than a similar standard VPS setup. Clouds are not magical. In many cases it's just a marketing ploy to get you enthralled with the promise of new technology that will achieve everything you ever dreamed of. I'd actually go so far as to say that cloud setups tend to be less reliable than other solutions because there are more things that can go wrong when you separate disk and CPU resources. > If so, we're comparing 99.9% uptime vs. 100% uptime. And having a site that loads 50% slower, for instance, would not worth the 0.1% uptime. Uptime promises only matter if the company is willing to compensate you when stuff goes down. For example, WiredTree has a very aggressive 100% uptime SLA on their VPSes now and I have successfully gotten credited for downtime I had when the host I was on suffered a kernel panic. No technology is foolproof (even cloud) and you would be foolish to assume that anything a provider says with regard to uptime will be completely true. > My site is nearly 100% mysql driven The question here then is how expensive are the queries you are running and how big is your database? The Linode I was running with over 550,000 views a day was also MySQL driven - each site had a database of some sort, whether it be a forum or Wordpress. Careful optimization of your MySQL settings can net you huge benefits, but it's important to look at your application and see what it needs, first. > I know the kneejerk response is to say get a dedicated box With your traffic, my gut response is that dedicated is massive overkill. > It's throttled 6 min. per day I'm not sure what you mean by this - I suppose your provider has some means of tracking CPU usage and is starting to cut you off. My experience is that with high quality VPS providers, CPU does not become an issue at all. If you have a VPS, you can often tune settings so that your stuff doesn't use too much CPU. Hope some of this wall of information is helpful.
Thanks Ghan_04, yes, that is very helpful. Exactly the kind of information I'm hoping to gather from users. Wish we had more input from others' experiences too about cloud vs. vps vs dedicated and when each is appropriate to use....
I'd get a VPS. Much cheaper than dedicated and closer to what you need, and it's proven technology. I actually trust a good VPS provider like Linode over most cloud providers because the cloud stuff is newer and all the kinks haven't been worked out yet. (I know this varies from provider to provider, but it's a generalization) I have two Linodes now, and I could not be happier. The one I've had for the longest had over 365 days uptime before I manually rebooted it to add disk space when Linode upgraded their plans for everyone for free.
Since VPS has had much better uptime, is much faster, and gives you much more freedom, since you can install any panel you want, it will be good solution. Check out Topxen.com VPS hosting solutions. The price is very reasonable compared to other hosts I've seen. They have nice reputation, so I decided to recommend them to you.
So, in theory, most random VPS providers should be faster than what I have now (listed at top of post)? I was told by a couple people my specs for shared hosting are impressive (and the qty of people I'm sharing that server with is limited), so if I 'upgraded' to a VPS system on some random host I'm afraid I might end up with less RAM and less bandwidth, and a more complex server, which I don't know how to manage myself.
I would not go with just any random VPS provider. You should use one that you've done some research on and gets good recommendations from others.
No, not at all. That advice is coming from people who have no idea what they're talking about. A VPS will not necessarily be faster than shared hosting. Same goes with the reliability factor, uptime, etc. It all just depends on the provider, the server, etc. An oversold VPS server is going to be a heck of a lot slower than most shared hosting servers. Disk i/o is another issue. As an example, we put a minimum of 8 HDDs in our shared hosting servers. There are VPS providers out there who only use 2 drive arrays, some use 4 drives, etc. And you generally have users on VPSs using more disk i/o. To say that one of those VPSs will be faster than a shared hosting account, would be laughable at best. If you go with a quality VPS provider, who does not oversell their servers (especially Xen-based servers), then sure, you're going to get to use more CPU (probably a core or two...or more), you're going to be able to use a lot more RAM, and things are probably going to be good. If you go with a cheap VPS provider, there is a good chance that your experience is going to be very similar to what you're experiencing now.
Not really, as certain of the client prefer to own a dedicated server instead went to cloud and some even is opposite stories.