Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Web Hosting : Is VPS the solution?

[moxy]

I'm a complete newb at hosting - in fact I don't even want to do it by I've painted myself into a bit of a corner with a client - long story so I'll just cut to the chase.


We're using a component called Hot Property for Mambo CMS (now joomla) for a large boat brokerage.

Their db is about 11 megs - will probably double over the course of a year or so. Currrently have them hosted on a high end shared server. Lately we've had some lockups - the day after they upgraded MySQL from 4.0 to 4.1.14, coincidentally, but I really don't know if that's significant.

The php that creates the queries is probably not ideal - about 47 queries per page. Advanced Searches balloon up to about 1800 queries.

The main table has about 130,000 rows, fwiw.

There's generally 50 - 100 site visitors at a peak time, but there are about 9 brokers that actually write data to the db (adding properties for sale with about 300 fields of info each, 50 of which get used per property.

I'm wondering if I'd be better off moving to a vps - my concern is that I'm no Sys Admin. I'd need one tuned up with php/MySQL and ready to go (i.e. turnkey)

Any thoughts on whether this would help improve performance and avoid tables locking (which happened twice today, but hasn't in the previous 9 months that the site has been live - which makes me wonder about the host's contention that it's the fault of queries being too lengthy...)

Enough of my problems. Anyone have any thoughts?

Thanks in advance for sharing your expertise.

[VanHost]

Welcome to the forums moxy!

There are no guarantees that a VPS will solve your problems, as it would seem that:

a) the server you are currently on is overcrowed. This could happen with a VPS provider depending on what their client to server ratios are.

b) your scripts are not properly optimized, meaning that wherever you take them, they are going to bog down the system.

The best route, I think, would be to ensure that your scripts are optimized as efficiently as possible first. You can also ask your current host if they have any sort of caching system in place for PHP/mySQL queries. This will slow down the number of queries to your DB and therefore, less strain on the system.

Test that out for a few weeks. If you still run into problems, I would suggest going with a semi-dedicated plan. Basically, they are shared hosting plans with very few clients to a server. You won't have to worry about server management either.

Of course, these are just my opinions. I'm sure you'll get a few Best of luck.

[moxy]

Originally posted by VanHost
[B]Welcome to the forums moxy!

Thanks - I have to admit to lurking around here a few times - and have learned a ton.

a) the server you are currently on is overcrowed. This could happen with a VPS provider depending on what their client to server ratios are.

This was my concern. I'm really wondering if after they upgraded - remember, all of my queries had been functioning well for eight months prior to the upgrade - they hadn't optimized their sql and server load became more of an issue.

b) your scripts are not properly optimized, meaning that wherever you take them, they are going to bog down the system.

There's probably some room for improvement, but we've actually streamlined the db calls a lot from the out-of-the-box component - and this particular component is really well saturated in the Real Estate market. I can't imagine that it's that bad - but we're definitely going to have another look.

Test that out for a few weeks. If you still run into problems, I would suggest going with a semi-dedicated plan. Basically, they are shared hosting plans with very few clients to a server. You won't have to worry about server management either.

This sounds promising! I'm going to look into this - it's a permutation of hosting I haven't heard about.

Thanks for the tips - much appreciated.