I am on shared hosting plan now. I get about $4k uniques monthly and increasing. I am worried that there will be one day i need to go to VPS or dedicated option. Does anybody know what clues i need to observe.
I am guessing that you did not mean for the dollar sign. I would worry about the bw more than the uniques. I went vps when my uniques were about 10k uniques a day. But again, it was more for bandwidth than anything.
carl, bandwidth is not a problem for me. I guess its a long way for me to get that much uniques. But then again curious to know how much of load does a shared host like hostgator or bluehost would survive.
I know people who get an unreal amount of traffic from both of those hosts. There are several factors to keep in mind, some applications take more resources than others but if these are nothing major I would not worry for a long time. Look at it this way. 4k uniques is a unique every 10 and a half minutes. Imagine if you used your computer every 10 minutes. Not exactly resource drain. btw. I use slhost for my VPS. You definately need to add them to yur recent blog post. I guess I will post that as a comment.
They will warn you unless your account is making the server unstable. In that case, account suspension. Otherwise, they warn your first, then they proceed ti suspension.
There is no hard and fast rule for when to upgrade from a hosted environment to a VPS or dedicated machine. I would submit, there are at least four conditions under which you should move: 1 -- If you are running a processor intensive site -- one with numerous complex scripts and constant reads and writes to a database 2 -- If you store a lot of data and you keep running out of hard drive spac 3 -- If you keep upgrading your account, it is time to move up 4 -- People with processor intensive sites make your's slow
4K monthly uniques is nothing. i have 100K unqiues and it runs fine on my hostgator shared hosting plan.
To me, this is the most important consideration. If your site is making plenty of money, then there is no reason not to go VPS. The cost difference between a reseller plan and a VPS is very small. The difference between shared hosting and VPS is larger but once you get WebHostManager and shell access you can never go back.