do you recommend vps or shared hosting?

[electrogypsy]

my website currently uses vbulletin 4 on a dreamhost VPS, and it's still slow, and gets database errors/timeouts, etc, and stops working at all when i drop the ram below 600mb.

im really liking xenforo, but i was wondering if it works well on shared hosting? or, what specs would you recommend (ram, etc) for a VPS?

my site currently has 4,000 members, 800 or so active, and about 30-40 online at any given time. thanks!

 

[dedi adinata]

I run my site on shared hosting. Never had any problems.
It's not the busiest site in the world but we have had over 200 online at once, with 50 in chat.

If you can afford/justify the cost of VPS then sure, go for that.
Until my site starts paying its own way though, it will stay on shared.

are you serious ? 200 concurrent user in shared hosting ? nice

 

[User]

Not all shared hosts are created equal, some (many?) of them massively oversubscribe their resources and that's when you run into issues. I ran on shared (hurricane electric) for a good long while and it was just fine for a small-ish board. Once I got up to 200-300 concurrent users I started to run into memory issues and moved over to a VPS with dedicated memory.

In terms of VPS I would make sure that you buy from the people who own the datacenter rather than from a VPS reseller. Resellers in my experience tend to not add any value but just tack on extra cash for the same service. I currently use linode but you have to be aware that it is unmanaged so the maintenance is entirely up to the owner. If that's not for you then find a good managed VPS host with 24/7 phone support because if you are paying the money for managed then you may as well have someone to call at 3AM. The whole forum or email only support is usually a giveaway for that it's just some guy reselling the VPS service as opposed to a "real company" that will support what you pay for.

 

[Dominion]

I've got a shared account at the moment, but will probably upgrade to VPS eventually simply to get control over the server's global parameters (which is a necessity for Japanese language searches).

Others in this thread have mentioned the PHP memory limit. My hosting company has their servers set to 32MB by default, but I was told that should I need more I would be able to copy the global php.ini into my cgi-bin directory and tweak it as necessary. (I'm running PHP as CGI with suEXEC.)

So if you find your provider's memory limit too low, they may be open to discussing a workaround.

 

[Brett Peters]

I run my site on shared hosting. Never had any problems.
It's not the busiest site in the world but we have had over 200 online at once, with 50 in chat.

If you can afford/justify the cost of VPS then sure, go for that.
Until my site starts paying its own way though, it will stay on shared.

I hope you dont mind me asking who your hosting provider is ?
I am currently on shared hosting but will be looking at either upgrading or moving hosts shortly after doing some further research into hosting.

 

[Paul B]

Currently it's eUKhost.

 

[Brett Peters]

Currently it's eUKhost.

Thanks Brogan it is much appreciated, I shall have a look and do the appropriate research to see if they suit my needs.

 

[Ryan Kent]

I use surpasshosting.com for shared hosting. They are another name for HostDime. Not a reseller but part of HostDime.

After a bumpy start, I would say my experience with them is excellent. They have 24/7 live support, and are very fast on e-mail support. Their definition of "fully managed" is much higher then that of most companies. They have written custom .htaccess changes for me, as an example.

My site is small with daily peaks of under 50 concurrent users, and average is about 20. They are a bit slower then I prefer, but not much. I asked them about upgrading to VPS for better performance and they actually advised against it. I asked a 2nd tech because I was shocked at the first reply, and they offered the same advice.

Why? They said VPS is great if you require specific settings, or if you require more consistency. But a good shared environment, which is hard to find, beats a VPS. The shared servers have more memory, bigger processors, etc and if they are not oversold it can be better.

Of course, with enough $$ a VPS can clearly be upgraded to equal or exceed the shared environment. I am just sharing this in case some would like another view point. I realize I'll get blasted as 99% of people prefer VPS.

 

[User]

While I agree that in general most forums should start out in a shared requirement the following does beg for a response.

Why? They said VPS is great if you require specific settings, or if you require more consistency. But a good shared environment, which is hard to find, beats a VPS. The shared servers have more memory, bigger processors, etc and if they are not oversold it can be better.

It is really not correct that shared servers have more memory. The physical server that runs the shared hosting may have more memory but that memory is not available to individual subscribers. Perhaps more important than the actual memory available (which is low no matter what) is that most shared hosts put a hard limit on the memory available to PHP. That hard limit can not be overwritten by your own php.ini and phpinfo will at times display an incorrect amount. Let's have a look at what 1&1 (one of the largest shared providers world-wide) has to say about the php memory limit:

Due to resource limits on our Shared Hosting machines, it is not possible to allocate more than 30M of memory to PHP via the memory_limit directive, although phpinfo() may report a higher number. While you may specify more than 30M for the memory_limit PHP directive via a php.ini or .htaccess file, the server will not allocate more than 30M.

Source: http://faq.1and1.com/scripting_languages_supported/php/13.html

So once again, shared is a good way to start out, but there is no circumstance under which shared can beat a VPS from a technology point of view.

 

[Xarcell]

my website currently uses vbulletin 4 on a dreamhost VPS, and it's still slow, and gets database errors/timeouts, etc, and stops working at all when i drop the ram below 600mb.

im really liking xenforo, but i was wondering if it works well on shared hosting? or, what specs would you recommend (ram, etc) for a VPS?

my site currently has 4,000 members, 800 or so active, and about 30-40 online at any given time. thanks!

OMG, I seen the words "DreamHost" and had to reply. Let me tell you about my experience with NightmareHost(I mean DreamHost). I used DreamHost for over 7 years and after making the change, I don't see why I didn't do it sooner. I have had nothing but problems with them. DreamHost was my first host, so every time something went wrong, I was convinced it was my fault. Now I know better and quite frankly it pisses me off.

I imagine DH VPS may be different, but on shared hosting they are way oversold. However I won't get into all that. What I will tell you is that they use really old security practices. I'm not saying it's not secure, because it is. However some of the old practices they use should not be used anymore because they will interfere with certain scripts, especially php. Things that have been fixed in the 5.X versions of php. I had to learn to disable "extra mod security" on every one of my domains to get it to run new up-to-date php scripts.

DreamHost is oversold. It was good back in the day, but now the support & service just blows. They got more going on than they can handle. I finally got fed up and left them after it started taking a week to answer support tickets on several occasions throughout the year.

To answer your question, xenforo is very efficient. From what I hear people that have switched to xF have been able to reduce server costs, because it overall uses less resources. I was running xF just fine on shared hosting, as many people here claim it does.

 

[electrogypsy]

yeah i switched away from dreamhost to hostgator today because dreamhost's billing department has NO IDEA what they are doing. they "lost" my 300 dollar payment to them, didn't say anything about it, then decided a year later to ask me to pay it again. screw that, i took my files and left.