I have a site, http://www.u-rate-it.com, that is currently hosted with OneAndOne (http://www.oneandone.co.uk) in the UK.

It's on a server with loads of other sites and although there's a fair amount of webspace, I am thinking of what might happen in the (unlikely?) event that I need to cope with more traffic.

I'd also like to be able to cope with lots of email (both incoming and outgoing) if necessary.

I really don't know whether to go for a shared server or a dedicated server or stick with what I've got. I guess it largely depends on the traffic I might get.

Any advice gratefully received.

Well you didn't say how much space and data transfer you're using, however if it's not really a huge amount right now, you're probably ok with a regular shared hosting account.

If it starts to increase (or is pretty high as is), but not so much to the point that it's worth a few hundred on a dedicated server, you might want to look into sharing a server with 2 or 3 others (asking around WHT, will probably find you a few people looking for the same thing).

Of if it goes beyond both of those, then yes it's time for a dedicated server :)

I hope that helps somewhat, good luck :)

Certainly does help. Thanks for that.

At the moment I think I have 800MB webspace with a 40000MB bandwidth per month. My main issue really I guess is page load time. The site seems quite slow at the moment. Any opinions on that at all? As the site relies heavily on PHP and access from a database, sharing the database server may slow things down(?) If anyone has any performance thoughts on using MySQL and PHP, that would be great. Thanks

Any suggestions for the site also gratefully received! ;)