May 15, 201016 yr Hi all. I am thinking that in the nearfuture I am switching to dedicated hosting. At the moment I'm on a shared hosting and it is enough for the amount of traffic. However, I wanted to see how you guys and gals run your own personal site. Dedicated, VPS or shared?
May 15, 201016 yr That question is really not going to help you at all because unless EVERY website is identical to yours, then everybody is going have a different answer. No 2 websites are exactly the same, it has to be based on who your hosting with, and what resources your website needs. Some host's might "sell" you unlimited everything, only for you to find its super slow, and they might tell you you need a dedicated server, when in fact, your website doesnt use much and their servers are oversold, overloaded and they want you off them with your small amount of traffic... So its not really the kind of question thats going to help you much to decide. We have some customers on shared hosting that do 200+GB a month of traffic, but use very little resources, and are on servers with less than 50 other tiny websites, and we have others that have 100+ websites on them.. Its how your host balances things for you that matters. A VPS is always worse than shared/dedicated too, especially for a live enviroment, so if your referring to live websites, anybody ticking "VPS" has taken a step sideways from shared, not a step up.
May 15, 201016 yr A VPS is always worse than shared/dedicated too, especially for a live enviroment, so if your referring to live websites, anybody ticking "VPS" has taken a step sideways from shared, not a step up. What? Can you please explain why you think this?
May 15, 201016 yr Author Thanks for the reply. Well I'm not a hosting expert at all so I was wondering how others do their hosting solution. I am just thinking ahead and see what the possibilities in the long run. Maybe I am missing the point here but I hear from a lot of people that if your site grows it's the dedicated server you have to go for. Obviously I need to research this area Is VPS really a sidestep? I read it was in between shared and dedicated. Thanks for the replies
May 16, 201016 yr Obviously I need to research this area Is VPS really a sidestep? I read it was in between shared and dedicated. Thanks for the replies I remember this debate coming up before. We use virtualisation in house to reduce physical hardware requirements, and only once hit a snag with our configuration in the early days - some 2 years ago! Since then it has been reliable with almost native performance on most fronts. Of course, we ensure our usage is optimised across the VPS hardware so no virtual servers are bottlenecking on disk I/O or hitting RAM limits etc. With a VPS platform used by multiple clients, it obviously becomes more difficult to regulate disk and network I/O to ensure "fair usage". But then the same is true of shared hosting really - a very busy site could excessively (ab)use disk/database or network access. At either stage, it's time to move that client to a dedicated solution - their level of usage would warrant it anyway! A VPS can be seen as "in between shared and dedicated" in the sense that you are still sharing hardware (CPU, RAM, disk, network etc.) but you have your own software server on which to install any application you choose, and customise the environment to your requirements. Also on a decent node, there are far fewer clients (say 8-16) than on a shared hosting package, although each is guaranteed limited resources. On the flip side, sometimes being on shared hosting is beneficial - if you have a sudden burst in traffic on shared hosting, a dedicated server (on which shared hosting clients are located) with 8GB RAM could cope more easily with the extra RAM requirements than a virtual server with a 512MB RAM limit and only 128MB free! So: shared hosting is cost-effective and may allow you to cope with sudden short peaks in demand better than a VPS. Virtual servers are great when your I/O is reasonable and you want to customise your environment. A suitable dedicated server will do anything exceptionally, but at a price! It's all trade-offs in this world
May 16, 201016 yr I remember this debate coming up before. Ah, I see Wesh didn't back up their statement about VPS being no better than shared hosting last time either. If you have the skills/knowledge and the time to configure your VPS it will be miles ahead of any shared hosting.
May 16, 201016 yr Author If you have the skills/knowledge and the time to configure your VPS it will be miles ahead of any shared hosting. Yeah that's what is needed. I am a complete noob to how to configure stuff like that. For me VPS seems a more affordable option than dedicated hosting but what Connetu_C said puts things into a different light. Thanks for your answer.
May 17, 201016 yr A VPS is always worse than shared/dedicated too, especially for a live enviroment, so if your referring to live websites, anybody ticking "VPS" has taken a step sideways from shared, not a step up. Wow, what a ridiculous generalisation. Some VPS solutions can be worse than very good shared hosting, in that a good shared hosting server will likely have 16GB RAM+ and other equivalent hardware specifications, so allowing sites to 'burst', whereas a poorly set up VPS could easily fall over under a deluge of traffic. That said, this only applies to badly set up virtual dedicated servers. The power of a VPS/VDS is in the configurability of the system, such that you can tweak your web server (not necessarily Apache), MySQL, PHP configurations (e.g. opcode caching) in order to get the best performance possible for your site. You can also set up things like memcached instances on your VPS/VDS to improve performance further. A good VPS/VDS can easily be better that a low end dedicated server in many respects - including performance but not least redundancy and reliability.
May 17, 201016 yr I recently upgraded from shared to managed VPS hosting with the same hosting company. There has been a considerable improvement in performance.
May 19, 201016 yr What? Can you please explain why you think this? Ah, I see Wesh didn't back up their statement about VPS being no better than shared hosting last time either. If you have the skills/knowledge and the time to configure your VPS it will be miles ahead of any shared hosting. Firstly, there was no "backing up a statement" required, were all entitled to our opinions, and THIS forum is used in our spare time, so if you dont see any reply to something for a while, it has nothing to do with "Not backing up a statement", its simply because, like everybody else here, we have better things to do, things we are paid for. The reason "we" see a VPS as a step sideways has been explained very well by Connetu_C A good quality shared server that is NOT overloaded or oversold, has plenty iin reserve to cope with script hiccups, traffic bursts, and any such requirement of some room to breathe as it were, and can easily maintain speed, even without all this "caching and optimising" (Which come with there own problems too) A VPS if you like, while having fewer clients on it, will have busier websites, due to many who advise it as an upgrade from shared, so a VPS server with 20% of a shared servers client total, may equally be required to put out the same amount of usage in both traffic and CPU/Memory/Disk input/output, but a VPS node will then also have multiple operating systems, the VPS software, and any control panel software, plus all the different configurations to contend with, while only having less resources sitting in reserve should anything "hiccup" My "generalisation" is purely that exactly, "in general" Our opinion is that a VPS/VDS is indeed a step sideways, due to the lack of "spare" resources, and the increase in applications all competing for the hardware resources, all with different configurations. Were well aware some might totally disagree, and thats fine, but no need to belittle us for that, you have your opinions, and we have ours, and were well aware that some people might indeed see an improvement in website speeds on a VPS, but given the extreme number of possible configurations and types of websites out there all doing different things, some might see an improvement while others might find it worse. Oh, and if you dont here from us for a while, its because we dont drop in here very often at the moment, we do have other things to do than bulk up a forum sponsored by yet another "unlimited reseller host"
May 19, 201016 yr My "generalisation" is purely that exactly, "in general" A VPS is always worse than shared/dedicated too, especially for a live enviroment, so if your referring to live websites, anybody ticking "VPS" has taken a step sideways from shared, not a step up. That is not a generalisation. That is an absolute. Also, when somebody is asking a question in which you give an answer I see no reason not to ask for clarification of reasoning, which you have now given.. I do of course disagree with the majority of it, but thank you for at least explaining why you think that is so.
May 22, 201016 yr A VPS is always worse than shared/dedicated too, especially for a live enviroment, so if your referring to live websites, anybody ticking "VPS" has taken a step sideways from shared, not a step up. I think you're missing the point of a VPS, you've obviously just had a bad experience. A VPS allows you FULL, root access to your server. It has the functionality of a dedicated server at a lower cost. It is MUCH better than shared hosting for someone who knows how to use it.
May 26, 201016 yr I think you're missing the point of a VPS, you've obviously just had a bad experience. A VPS allows you FULL, root access to your server. It has the functionality of a dedicated server at a lower cost. It is MUCH better than shared hosting for someone who knows how to use it. I do agree with your point VPS is much better than shared hosting when you requirements are more than what a shared server will allow and budget is low to buy a dedicated server.
May 31, 201016 yr I think you're missing the point of a VPS, you've obviously just had a bad experience. A VPS allows you FULL, root access to your server. It has the functionality of a dedicated server at a lower cost. It is MUCH better than shared hosting for someone who knows how to use it. We know, it was in reference to performance, not functionality. While clearly functionality is totally unrestricted given its full on "virtual" server enviroment, the performance is where it lacks over the "available" resources of shared accounts. Shared accounts can burst an entire servers resources if need be, which will always be more than that allocated to a VPS, and shared servers dont have multiple operating systems competing for disk input/output. Hence the "Step sideways". Maybe "worse" was a bad word to use, maybe "Just not an upgrade" as a VPS is more suited to development enviroments that cant be customised on shared plans.
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