Real world benefits of switching to VPS
 

Okay so I'm with Vidahost on a shared plan at the moment (have to say they're excellent by the way), so good in fact if you PM I'll reply back with a 10% coupon code

Anyway I've been with them for 3 years now and as I've learnt more I've started to outgrow the shared hosting that I have, in short there are limitations to what I can do with my space. For example I would like to swap in digital point's sphynx search and like to try some form of caching too.

So what I want to know before I really consider switching from them is, is it really worth it.

At the moment I get 25Gb/Files, 100GB/Bandwidth, One2One support R1 Soft backup every 4 hours with a 2 week history. In the last year I can hand on heart say that I've had total downtime of less than 20 minutes. That's pretty good huh especially at £9.99, VPS minimum I can see is at about £15 starting but I'm not sure what specs I should go for.

Help please.

Is it worth it? :)

TBH no. I hate when people smugly turn a question back round :p

+ I'd lose cPanel for Plesk

Having the automatic backups is a huge bonus and I'm not sure I'd forgive myself if I lost everything

--------------- Added [DATE]1309029452[/DATE] at [TIME]1309029452[/TIME] ---------------

How much RAM would you need to comfortably run vBulletin?

Being faced with this problem myself, I've been doing some reading. I found an old post at vb.com that says they were running a busy board with 512mb, so I guess that's a minimum.

But for $30 USD/mo my host includes 1gb ram and Cpanel managed hosting, so that's what I'm looking at right now. Their basic VPS ($15USD/mo) also does not include managed hosting or Cpanel and is only 512mb.

I don't think my host includes any backups, but that doesn't matter as I like to keep backups here, not there anyway, so I download my db daily. And I can still live with monthly Cpanel backups as I'm doing now.

Which host are you with at the moment that's offering $30 a month. Are you State side. UK prices seem considerably more expensive sigh.

The back ups is an issue for me, I honestly couldn't commit to downloading a back up every day. What I was thinking was keeping a bare minimum shared hosting account open and replicating the database to that via the config file. I think there's a slave db option so that could potentially solve that one.

The other issue is my confidence being able to successfully move to a new host with minimum downtime.

Would really see a performance gain from switching? I'm going to email my current host and ask for some stats, I'll post back the response.

No, I just checked and WHB doesn't offer VPS in the UK.

You should be backing up your db daily! There's no "commitment" involved once you have it set up. A cron script compresses it in the morning, and my desktop task scheduler FTPs it to home at noon. Once a month I go in and delete all but the last couple and at the same time use Cpanel to manually do a full site backup.

The folly of depending on the host came home a couple years ago when we were suspended. Although we were quickly reinstated, I learned my lesson. If we had to move to a new host at that point, all the backups in the world stored at the host would have been totally useless.

Yeah I know I *should* but I couldn't do a set up like you at the moment anyway as I'm relying on my GF lappy for internet access at the moment, apart from my phone that is.

Look mate I got a quote for a fully managed VPS either 1GB of Ram or 2Gb. Seems like a good quote to me but still not sure on spec. No one is giving a definitive (not that I can see) as to what I actually need.

I plan on swapping Sphinx search in and getting some memcache going so I'm thinking I'll need two GB. My current host reckoned for my forum I would need a bare minimum of 1.

The quotes you got, where they for unmanaged?

No, the $30USD/mo is managed, with Cpanel. I just noticed though it's 512mb "guaranteed ram" and 1gb "burstable ram".

What they asking for 1GB and 2GB just so I can compare and do they include daily backups, mine are throwing in R1.

I gave their link in post 6. No idea what "R1" is.