Hi, i have a site and the part that my visitors use the most is a phpBB board, i use to have between 100 and 150 users connected at the same time and in my shared hosting lately has been slowing down, so i'm afraid that if i move to a VPS, we could saturate the server and if i get a dedicated, it couldn't handle all, i use about 50 GB of transfer per month and my database is over 1 GB (like 10 million hits per month), 10 GB of space is enough for the whole site, but what could you recommend me and which hosting services??? the most i could pay monthly is about 100 dollars and that would be with tons of effort (i don't make any money out of the site).. between 60 and 70 dollars would be better but.. please help me :bawling:

i know ev1 has $100 servers.. but if you tell me more about VPS and if that would work better for my site.. or a dedicated server that would work for the site, i really need comments of people who know about this..

Thanks a lot.

Dinix has a vps plan that's got like 10 gigs of space and 100 gigs of transfer - here's the URL to it:
http://dinix.com/hosting/virtual.htm

Keep in mind that some vps accounts aren't *too* far removed from a real dedicated server, technical-knowledge requirement wise. Also, most VPS accounts are cpu/ram limited, so you don't need to worry about your site taking down the server (usually). You'll want to clarify these things, as well as the level of support given before ordering.

A full dedicated would let you grow with the site - you'd get a lot more disk space and transfer for just a little more money - but there's extra technical stuff that you need to worry about (or pay someone else to worry about). This paying someone else is where things with dedicateds get expensive, usually.

For 150 concurrent users, if I were in your shoes, I'd make the jump to dedicated so I wouldn't have to move it again if I outgrew a vps.

Like thedavid said , you would probably be bettered served by a dedicated server since your needs arent that far from a dedicated server and you would likely have to move shortly .
BTW: You can get servers in the price range you are looking at.

Yeah, I agree, bandwidth isn't the only thing you need, the CPU load and other stuff come into play when dealing with large forums. So a small Dedicated server from ServerMatrix or Nocster for about $60.00 would do fine.

Even with our biggest plan I would still say dedicated as you will be pushing a machine quite hard

Rus

Dedicated all the way , where you go should depend on whether you can admin your own server. If you can EV1 prices are great.

I'd second what Rus said. I think you'd be better off on a dedicated server.

VPSs are great if your site needs to be 'bursty'. For example, if you idle along most of the time but then get a sudden burst of activity, VPSs are perfect.

Why? Since dollar of dollar your VPS host server is probably going to be a more powerfully speced server than the dedicated server you'd get. (e.g. I use dual xeons). So when the performance crunch is on you should get to burst up to the full processor speed on your host server.

But if you need a lot of CPU (or disk IO) for sustained periods of time then you'll probably be better off with a dedicated server.

why? you're saying that if I push 100Gbs in 1 day and idle 29 days VPS would work better than dedicated? Why won't then it work allright if I do 3Gbs per day 30 days in a row?

probably only a highly overloaded VPS server ... or am I missing something? you get your share of CPU and memory, usually quite comparable or exceeding that of a celeron that you can get for this money. and disk is much faster - so I don't see where cheap dedicated is better. More problems with cheap hardware in 70$ dedicated, that's the only big difference.

I'd say, get VPS for 50-70$ from servint or dinix and if you really outgrow it go for your own server - a good dual xeon with 1-2Gb ram - you should be doing enough money off your site by then.

I signed up for VPS, running BB. After about a week, I am ready to move to dedicated... and I am talking about NO TRAFFIC!!

The machine is simply not giving me anough resources. Somehow I don't think I am EVER getting anything close to the specs of the dual-processor beast. As a last resort, I am going to call tech to see if there is anything they can do.

So you can start with VPS, but be ready to move.....:bawling:

which provider?

Originally posted by mp3sattack
(i don't make any money out of the site)..

You may consider asking for donations or putting ads on your site to make it easier on your wallet.

Originally posted by piramida
which provider?

Let me talk to their tech first. I don't like to "smear" hosting companies. I like everything else about the provider except for the performance I am getting.

I get great response on my vps, pushing four forums with constant (though low) load. Turck mmcache and mysql query caching helps a lot.

I have done more testing on this. On a large forum the response time is not good. On a small forum, the response time is good. Besides mysql seek time, etc. I now believe that the limit on memory causes disk caching for the large forum (a limit of VPS IMHO, but not a limit of shared hosting for example). So even though they say one can use all the avail. memory if no one else is, I don't believe this is really happening (or not efficiently).

I think mysql query caching is on automatically? Are you changing its parameters in any way?

I have read about Turek, but am going to take a serious look @it now.

ez

Originally posted by Oopsz
I get great response on my vps, pushing four forums with constant (though low) load. Turck mmcache and mysql query caching helps a lot.

MMcache has help me drop 30-40% off load on my dynamic site, I also use jpcache to cache a handful of my pages, one with 20 queries, which could be done also with MMcache. A

when you use mysql query caching, is that what this does in my.conf

query_cache_limit=1M
query_cache_size=32M
query_cache_type=1

I have been using CacheLite... I did not realize that mmcache can save variables in-memory. CacheLite is solid but a bit slow... I am going to implement mmcache to see if that speeds things up.

As far as jpcache, I cannot figure why I use it instead of CacheLite.

On a different note, does anyone running VPS think that they get anything close to machine's ram (4-8 gigs) at anytime in the day??

ez

Well of course you never get full machine RAM, not unless all other customers kill all of their resident processes which sure never happens. Everyone runs httpds and mysqlds even when idling; the question is - how much free memory does your host machine have at any given time? Is it swapping? Our VPSes at ServInt always have some spare memory, from 128Mb at peak loads to 1Gb at offpeak. And that is not counting disk cache, too. We're running Tomcats (real heavy stuff) and apaches and all that, didn't have any problems with memory so far.

A few other VPS providers have already chimed in, however I conflict with them a little bit in my thinking.

You could get a Celeron dedicated server for $75/mo. This would be cheap hardware with the possibility of failing even soon after you purchase it (it's possible it's the server was used by a previous customer who canceled). With a quality VDS you will receive RAID disk storage and server backups included in the price. With a VDS you will also be able to scale better. Take the situation where your VDS is CPU limited, you can simply purchase more guaranteed CPU from your provider and most of the time they will be able to upgrade you without shutting down your VDS.

If you want pure speed you might be better with a Virtuozzo/VServer provider (as much as it pains me say it as we use UML). UML is not as slow as some people like to say though. On an idle server a VDS running under UML can compile a Linux kernel roughly 30 seconds slower than the host server in my tests.

If you're on a budget I would recommend at least trying a VDS out, most have trial plans or money back guarantees. Check to make sure it's a "no questions asked" guarantee.

I agree with the above. I would go with VDS first, and see if it satisfies requirements. It is a great step up from shared, and easier to figure out compared to a dedicated.

Based on my experiments, if you do not have huge mysql indecis, you will be fine. Otherwise, as suggested, you can get more VDS bandwidth, etc.

This is also a good point that a VDS server is backed up properly,and if something fails, the hosting co. has 15 screaming customers (vs. 1) which is a nice position to be in.

ez

After thinking about it for one more day....


I don't think performance is the reason to go from shared to VDS.

The reason to make that jump is if you need your own "sandbox" to play in, i.e. you need to recompile apache (something beyond what you can do with .htaccess), or recompile mysql, etc... or add some other processes, or have a background process that would really take over the cpu cycles (thus would cause you to be booted from shared environments).

In the case of BB, and if that is all that's running, I cannot see a VDS being any faster than a reputable shared.

Also I have done some work to cut between 10-15 sql queries from every page. That may by itself fix your performance problem. If interested, PM me.

So the next step IMHO is dedicated (even a low end dedicated), or optimize BB.

Comments?

Originally posted by ezclassified
After thinking about it for one more day....


I don't think performance is the reason to go from shared to VDS.

The reason to make that jump is if you need your own "sandbox" to play in, i.e. you need to recompile apache (something beyond what you can do with .htaccess), or recompile mysql, etc... or add some other processes, or have a background process that would really take over the cpu cycles (thus would cause you to be booted from shared environments).

In the case of BB, and if that is all that's running, I cannot see a VDS being any faster than a reputable shared.

Also I have done some work to cut between 10-15 sql queries from every page. That may by itself fix your performance problem. If interested, PM me.

So the next step IMHO is dedicated (even a low end dedicated), or optimize BB.

Comments?

I think it is more to do with having the necessary resources to support a forum on his size. Now cutting down on queries helps, you can setup to only allow posting every 60-90 seconds, use a compiling program, caching program.

But he is near/at/or close to beyond the point the of shared hosting, unless he moves to one of those providers who providing semi shared hosting I think it is called where you have fewer guaranteed sites per server.

With a VPS or dedicated he could guarantee a certain level of performance that can not be guaranteed with a shared host and can have room to grow.