Question regarding hosting

[bbad]

We currently run our 2.x forum on a $19.95 a month shared server. We are being told that we need to move due to resource utilization. As I see it, we are nowhere near our monthly disk space or bandwidth quota, so I guess maybe it has something to do with CPU or Memory. We checked with another service provider and after he saw our forum statistics he said he wouldn't want to put us on his shared services plan either. He recommended a dedicated server.

Our DB is approximately 3 Gigabytes while our home directories (I.e., mail, php, etc) is only 600 Megabytes. We use approximately 30 Gig of bandwidth a month.

Can anyone tell me if our statistics are so very high that we should consider a dedicated server instead of shared server? And, can anyone make recommendations in respect to a good hosting company?

[Patrick]

Hey bbad,

Looking at the stats alone, it is tough to say, because there is more to it. What else the community does, the content, the traffic, etc.

Instead of going for a dedicated server, you may want to look for a VPS provider. They can represent a cheaper middle ground and some VPS providers offer a, more or less, fully managed solution. http://www.liquidweb.com is an example (I just created a VPS account with them myself).

Thanks,

Patrick

[bbad]

Patrick,

thanks for the response. I did do some research last night and I am on to the VPS solution now. I've been getting quotes but I'm just not sure how much CPU/Mem I actually need as I am currently on a shared hosting solution which doesn't give us shell/root access so I have no way of trying to guage our memory/cpu usage.

I appreciate the response though. Have you used any of the open source administrative GUI interfaces? the reason I ask is becuase some of the other administrators are not linux guys and so therefore I will need some sort of administrative tool for when I'm not doing things. I don't really want to pay extra $10-$20 a month for a cpanel license.

[Patrick]

Hey bbad,

My pleasure. I haven't, unfortunately. Personally, I'd say that CPanel is worth it and with some VPS providers, it is included, as well. Just worth it for the convenience, I'd say.

Thanks,

Patrick

[bbad]

Thought I would Update this thread with our current situation:

We were running a Phpbb 2.x forum of which the "shared" host felt obligated to run php 4 to support. Of course, being the only site on that particular shared environment requiring php 4 was the reason that our host felt we were using to many resources and that we should leave.

After updating to phpbb 3.x, with the help of YOU people, we are now utilizing PHP 5 which allowed the host to turn down version 4. This upgrade and the subsequent release of php 4 has freed up enough resources on the "shared" environment that our host says we no longer need to leave. Does PHPbb 3 have alot of performance enhancements in it as compared to version 2.x? Additionally, this upgrade has resolved the issue with our posting submissions sometimes being delayed for minutes or timing-out.

However, we were treated quit badly with the host doing things such as telling us one day we needed to leave becuase of the resource issue and then the next day randomly shutting us down becuase as he puts it "we were impacting other users on that server". So, we have purchase a VPN plan from another host and are in the process of configuring that envrironment to move our forum too. Ahh...it's nice to have shell access and also to be able to change your global variables when problems arise.

[Patrick]

Thanks for the update, bbad. Glad that you were able to make some headway!

Thanks,

Patrick