Steve & Stavros Country!

Steve and I have different views on VPS's.

My views all depend on how much traffic and database IO your getting.
and who else is on the the same physical tin as you.

so for instance I would not put an enterprise size SQL database on a vps as it would swamp the Vcpu and take the other vps's down.

My own site will be going on dedicated tin because I have a huge cron job that runs overnight and indexes all the newly added cv's.

In essence the answer to your question is how much IO is going through the site and what performance is like if it is fine then crack on but be awar if your hosting provider has not setup his contetion ratio correctly you may get slowdown that is not caused by your own load.

if you want a further chat dude you have got my number.

lol, not really, I think you've come round to my way of thinkng

As Stavros says, its down to load. My 5 pence worth, if you are getting/expecting serious traffic (eg 20,000 - 30,000 daily visitor plus - real visitors, not server log spiders) or running heavy duty databases, then go to dedicated hardware.

I run MLS UK and USA on different physical servers, and the UK one is currently in the process of upgrading to new hardware as we are starting to outgrow it (Traffic spike brought us down last Friday )

This forum has much less traffic and I wouldn't expect it to exceed 3 - 4000 daily visitors within the next 12 months, the forum software can be server intensive, but I've limited some of the heavier processing functions, so a VPS is an ideal and very cost effective option.

If we moved into the realms of UK Biz Forums traffic, then I'd reconsider and move the forums to their own hardware, but as the forums isn't a revenue genenerator apart from a few adsense pennies, its down to reliability versus/cost.

Being open source software, for security reasons I wouldn't run it on one of our physical servers, as any downtime or impact would hurt us commercially, and a VPS only costs tuppence hapenny compared to physical kit.

So really all down to budget and planning.

Things to remember, if its a non revenue generator, then prob VPS till you get performance probs.

If it is a revenue generator, I always apply the disaster recovery formula.

Assume your website goes bang and takes 24 hours to recover. Work out how much potential revenue you've lost, you then have an idea how much its worth spending each month to stop it going bang

Webhosting is one of my pet subjects and can bore you for hours

Even did a blog on it
Web Hosting ? maybe the most critical aspect of your online business? The Blog!

Cheers guys, the one i have is

I dont see a backup option anywhere in that list dude.

For the cost, yup. Thats the advantage of a VPS, its cheap!

Just keep an eye on your response times, look at your traffic now, use that as a baseline, and monitor growth.

If things start to slow down in 12 months, go for a physical box with more RAM

As always, well spotted! Make sure you have backup and a DR plan

It says back up in the backend, would this be it?


Source: kipfx.com

Yup, hopefully you can schedule it.

But also think DR plan. If the hardware broke tomorrow and the hosters had to replace it, how long before you were up and running, SLA's etc, who would do the restore.. how many backups do you keep? (ie what if your last backup is corrupted).

Time to get it all sorted is now, get it documented, then file it. If disaster strikes, dust off your DR plan and let it swing into action

Arguing with the hosting company while your off the air isn't the time to get it sorted..

...I like the idea of hearing you rant. Almost miss it

Though, got to agree, backups and DR plans are essential!