Advise - VPS or Dedicated?

[Paracelsus]

Hi,

We're currently thinking in upgrading our forum (which is turning quite big), which runs on shared hosting (but on a reseller's account, so it has special terms), and the next step would probably be a VPS. However, talking to our hosting company, they advise us to ignore VPS and run Dedicated, since the forum consumes a lot more than a VPS could handle (according to them).

Our forum specs are about:
- 2200 members, often between 100-200 online and sometimes even 300-400 (rare)
- 100-120 GB bandwidth (1 500 000 forum pageviews) every month
- Almost 500 000 posts, about 1 GB database
- Wiki based on Mediawiki coupled to forum user database (can't precise database, but relatively small)

As I see it, a VPS with 10 GB harddisk, unlimited bandwidth and 512 Mb RAM (minimum guaranteed) could do the job, but our hosting thinks that it needs, at least, 1 GB RAM and that is probably not enough to handle both forum and wiki, and thus the dedicated fits better. So I would like to hear from you what do you think is the best option.

[Something like that]

I'd strongly recommend 1 GB unless you're very good at tuning things.

500 GB of transfer will probably do you well allowing for some growth.

And you'll want lots more than 10 GB of disk space before long. Any speed of disk will do.

I'd recommend getting a low-end dedicated server. The price difference is not that much from the VPS you need, and you may find CPU usage to be a bottleneck on a VPS. Any processor will be okay, but a few more dollars for a dual core is money very well spent (I do 4.5 million page views on a 3 GHz Celeron, but I've also done quite a bit of optimisation.).

A competitive price for a dedicated server with those specs is around $50/mn. Look at the newly updated threads here for some good deals.

[Vekseid]

Never go with anyone who offers unlimited bandwidth.

A 768mb fcgi or mod_php setup will do the trick. I never broke that for Elliquiy, but during high-load periods I did break 500mb routinely.

You may want a gig to be safe, though.

[I JaR oF JaM I]

Never go with anyone who offers unlimited bandwidth.

A 768mb fcgi or mod_php setup will do the trick. I never broke that for Elliquiy, but during high-load periods I did break 500mb routinely.

You may want a gig to be safe, though.

When you say never to go with anyone who offers unlimited bandwidth, do you mean period, or just not unlimited when it comes to VPS and Dedicated?   Cuz I have a friend who uses unlimited bandwidth Shared Server (www.lunarpages.com) for 8 years and has never had a problem, and he has a decent size community (about 450 users).

Why shouldn't you use a service that offers unlimited bandwidth?

[Something like that]

When you say never to go with anyone who offers unlimited bandwidth, do you mean period, or just not unlimited when it comes to VPS and Dedicated?   Cuz I have a friend who uses unlimited bandwidth Shared Server (www.lunarpages.com) for 8 years and has never had a problem, and he has a decent size community (about 450 users).

Why shouldn't you use a service that offers unlimited bandwidth?

Unlimited bandwidth is a sales gimmick. Usually CPU usage becomes an issue long before bandwidth does, when running a forum. That includes shared, VPS, and dedicated. For instance, sometimes I'm already seeing up to 65% 5-minute-average CPU usage on my dedicated machine, and 90% usage for brief moments. Bandwidth used? 1.3 TB/month. There's no way I could use 3TB running just forums on my machine. So having "unlimited" bandwidth is my case is useless.

Using shared hosting is fine until your forums get busy. It's not so much the number of members, but how many users are online at once. Then you start running into CPU issues.

[Vekseid]

When you say never to go with anyone who offers unlimited bandwidth, do you mean period, or just not unlimited when it comes to VPS and Dedicated?   Cuz I have a friend who uses unlimited bandwidth Shared Server (www.lunarpages.com) for 8 years and has never had a problem, and he has a decent size community (about 450 users).

Why shouldn't you use a service that offers unlimited bandwidth?

450 over 8 years is at best mediocre in terms of activity, and that's what is going to count for processing load.

[I JaR oF JaM I]

I see, Phall, thanks for answering my question.

Vekseid, the forum I told you about is only 1 and a half years old.   He's been using their service for 8 years...

[青山 素子]

Unlimited bandwidth (as opposed to unmetered, which is a whole different thing) only means the host expects you to hit some other limit before you start pulling too much. You'll usually find those hosts impose a script timeout limit (usually 30 to 60 seconds max) and a CPU usage maximum percentage. Go over those a few times, and you'll be told to upgrade or face being down.

Note: This doesn't mean the host is a bad host for small sites. You can easily go for a long time without problems. However, if you expect to grow, keep a plan to move handy because you will hit a point where you'll be forced to pay the current host more, or move to a more reasonable host.

[I JaR oF JaM I]

Alright, thanks for all the info.   This helps me quite a bit, though I don't plan on my forums getting too big.

Thanks again.