Hi all,

I know there is no fixed answer to this, so I am just looking for general feedback.

If someone contacted you asking if a site would be suitable for your shared servers, at which point do you consider a site to be too large for shared hosting and recommend a VPS/dedicated?

Remember that I am not talking about looking at CPU/Memory usage, because you don't have that available to you when someone contacts you looking to move away from another host. I am talking about a situation when the person only has access to website stats so can only tell you what those stats say (daily page views/server hits etc).

It really depends as there is no concrete answer. There are too many unknown variables. IE if the site is static then it generally won't take up nearly the amount of resources as a cgi or php/mysql dynamic site would. What is their traffic like, IE how many pageviews and what backend is their site coded with?

-Steven

In space and bandwidth terms I would generally say 200GB bandwidth, and 20-30GB disk space, for us, but this if for my resellers. Shared accounts, I would not let them MAX out 100GB bandwidth and 5gb disk space. Then, I would direct them to one of my Resellers packages. These ofcourse are with "addons" with our current packages. It's cheaper just to move to another package. Anything higher, I would inform them they need a VPS.

Though, if a website was to utalize those allocations, you would know in the back of you mind it will add to some CPU usage and memory usage you already have.

Thanks for your replies.

What is their traffic like, IE how many pageviews and what backend is their site coded with?

This question is not related to a specific site, I am just looking for general feedback on what people consider to be too large for shared hosting.

You can't always go with disk/bandwidth because we all know that there are intensive sites that hardly touch the bandwidth quotas and then there are sites that can plough through bandwidth without really affecting the CPU usage. The one thing you don't want to do is tell the client that your shared plan is fine, then after they signup you need to tell them that you were wrong and they need to go dedicated.

Basically, let's say a customer e-mails you saying that they have a site that gets 1 million pageviews per day and uses MySQL/PHP for every page load, and they want to move it over to your shared hosting, obviously they are going to be told they need dedicated. I am looking to see what people consider the cuttoff figures to be before you would say "Sorry, that site is not suitable for our shared servers."

Disk space is not a problem in shared hosting. Its the amount of traffic that will decide on whether to move to a dedicated server or not. If you get a lot of traffic, you will be utilizing more server resources which will effect the server. So the host may ask you to move to a dedicated server. But with traffic like 1 millin page views per day I think one can afford 5 dedicated servers for a single site.