All of my sites are managed by shared hosting providers. Right now I'm having between 500 uniques/day and 2000 uniques/day. During peek hours, I have noticed that the crowdest site loads not very quicky. It's still not disturbing, but it's visible slower than at midnight. I wonder when it's the right moment to chose a dedicated server? Are there any online tools that are able to do some evaluations? Thanks
I would say 500-2000 unique visitors per day could warrant a dedicated server depending on what kind of data is being served, database usage, etc. Though in a shared environment its more likely that your host and server are having issues at this time, not your site. What is your budget and do you have any income from these sites?
You could also look into a VPS to save costs, and a lot of times a mid-range/high-end VPS can sometimes top a low end dedicated server and save you money at the same time. Do you have disk space/bandwidth requirements?
There is no magic number or set time to determine when it's time to upgrade. No amount of unique or daily visitors is going to determine that. What will determine it, however, is your resource usage. If you are running out of resources on a regular basis, it's time to upgrade. If everything is slowing down, like you say, theat's a good chance you're running out of resources during the peak periods, and it's time for an upgrade.
You could try at first a VPS, get familiarized then continue with a dedicated if necessary. A VPS cost less versus a dedicated. Both options you will get root access and control of it. If you are hosting blogs that have more than 300 unique visitors per day then you know you are ready for a VPS. Performance also will be superior since you will have your own IP address as well as CPU and RAM quota.
I would say my budget would be around $100/month. Right now I'm having some income on some sites, but not big. I decided that before I start pushing some ads, I have to have a constant number of visitors.
Your budget is right in between a low-quality server, and a great VPS. $100 really isn't going to get you a decent server, however $40-50 will certainly get a you a nice VPS.
Which would be the price of a decent server? What features should a server have in order to be considered decent? Thanks
Since you have a good budget for a great VPS plan then maybe you will want to consider moving now. It is best to move over before things start to get bogged down and locked up for you. If you move now you can also gain some familiarity with your new system before you have to jump in and move everything in rush because of volume and new requirements that your users and you may need. Plan ahead. If you think you might feel a crunch in the near future then take steps to create a smooth path now.
Hi, It all depends on how comfortable you are with server management, whether you need control panels, etc. A lot of people try to make the jump from shared hosting to VPS or dedicated servers, and fail to realize that they need the servers managed, need a control panel, etc. All add to the price of the server. You generally also want to have at least RAID1 in case a hard drive fails, which adds to the cost, plus the cost of a 2nd hard drive. For $100, you can probably get an older dual core or quad core server with a single hard drive and 4GB of RAM or so...maybe a little more. That will be unmanaged and will not come with a control panel. For cPanel, you can expect to add $20-30 per month in addition. ATOM servers are also decent options. You can pick up an ATOM server for $60-70, which will be a full dedicated server. Whether they will be as powerful as a high-level VPS...who knows? But they will offer you completely dedicated resources. Whatever you do, chances are either a good VPS or even an older dedicated server (or ATOM) will be an improvement over your shared hosting.