Is it time to switch to VPS?

[music_lp90]

Hi all,I have been researching webhosts for a while now and there's so many out there, it has not been easy. I think I've narrowed it down to a few, but am trying to figure out if I will need VPS. The one host that I've talked to about it is strongly recommending that we go with VPS. Our current account is a shared host and they have not mentioned anything to us about using too much bandwidth, CPU, or RAM, so I am trying to figure out if it's really necessary and if it will be beneficial.Here's some of our usage stats:Visits: 22,000-31,000Bandwidth: 80-175 GBAnything else that might be helpful in determining if VPS is appropriate?I think those numbers are fairly high, and the sales person is being honest, but at the same time, our site runs pretty well on our current shared host. I'm being asked to find a new host because of a number of recent issues we've had such as downtime due to our host having routing issues, them upgrading to PHP 5.3 without any notice to us, which was not compatible with our current site, and they had some hardware failures that caused downtime. Switching to VPS would mean another $20 or $30/mo.Also, with VPS, if we went with it, how much RAM would be appropriate or how could I determine this?Thanks for your help!

[justsomeguy]

In terms of hosting, you may want to move to a company that offers both shared and VPS in addition to whatever else, like a dedicated server. Hostgator is one company like that. You know your own numbers, so you can find a package that fits your usage, but I can give you numbers for a dedicated server that you can at least compare with.For the month of August our server had 422GB of bandwidth. I'm not sure how many visits that equates to, that's spread across maybe 5 fairly active accounts and maybe 20 low-activity accounts, I don't really want to total up the visit numbers myself. But, in the last 2 weeks the entire server has averaged 4.4 requests per second, with a total of 4955896 requests (last 2 weeks only). This server has a Xeon 2.4GHz dual-core CPU (or possibly 2 single-core Xeons), with 4GB of RAM. Right now the server has 184MB of RAM free out of 4GB, so obviously the server uses a lot of RAM. 4GB should be a minimum, you may want 8 or more. These accounts on the server get a lot of database usage, if we were going to upgrade the platform at this point we would keep the one web server and replace the database server with a cluster. It seems like the vast majority of bottlenecks are with the database.

[music_lp90]

Thanks, for the info. That helps a lot, especially helpful in knowing about how much RAM we would need.