VPS Suggestions?

[NoahsDad]

Few questions:

1. When do you know if you have out grown shared hosting?

2. Who do you suggest for shared hosting for a med sized blog? (At least I think I'd define our stie as. Any ideas what sort of traffic qualifies as small-traffic / med-traffic blog? )

[KevinBudzynski]

1.) Looks like great input from the two above

2.) I have used Liquid Web for the last few years and would recommend them. They are a bit expensive, but the incredible support and stable/fast servers makes up for the price.

[ThompsonPaul]

Worst case scenario, as Agents of Value says, your hosting provider will tell you you've outgrown shared hosting because your site has been causing problems for others on the server.

But by the time you get to that point, you've probably been giving your visitors a substandard experience for a while, which isn't good.

Best way? Be upfront with your host and ask them if they could monitor your site's resource for a while and let you know if they think you're approaching the limit. Looks like you're hosted on Site5 - they're tech guys are pretty good about that kind of thing.

Another thing you should be doing is running an independent monitoring service so you will have a 100% accurate picture of your site's uptime availability. By far the best tool I've come across for that also happens to be free for monitoring 1 website. Get a Pingdom account, and set it up to monitor one of your most active pages (usually your home page). In addition, customize the monitor to actually check for a specific snippet of text on the page - one that never changes. That way you're actually testing that the page is loading, not just that the server is responding.

If you notice outages starting to happen, even if they're just for a couple of minutes, that's usually an indication that you're outstripping your hosting account's resources & need to upgrade. Keeping track of page load times using webpagetest.org (mentioned to you in my other comment) will also alert you if you start to notice significant slowdowns.

As far as moving to the next level of hosting, you're in luck. Site5 has a cloud hosting option ($20/month) that gives more computing resources than their 1st level shared hosting. And if you need more than that, they have a really good VPS option that can be scaled with you as you grow (starting about $60/month). Great, reliable system, reasonably priced, and the big thing is it comes with full server management. Critical unless you're an experienced LAMP server administrator. When the time comes that you need to upgrade from shared, they'll be able to do it seamlessly for you. (I'm on a Site5 VPS and have been very pleased with performance and service.)

Paul

[AgentsofValue]

I've seen a lot of cases where people were basically 'asked to leave' by their hosting company, after their service outgrew their 'unlimited' shared hosting plan.  Performance can be another big issue.  If you find the site running slow, that might be an indication that you've outgrown the shared hosting you're on.

It's hard to quantify in terms of numbers of page views, as there are different types of software, and each type of software requires more or less resources.

Additionally, for a blog platform like Wordpress, you could probably try to stretch the limits of shared hosting some more by using one of the good caching plugins that exists, and using a CDN to serve your images.  Using a good caching plugin would reduce the amount of work that a server has to do to serve up your pages.  Doing that would probably keep your shared hosting company off of your page while you're continuing to grow.  A CDN would help to reduce your bandwidth usage and help to serve images faster.

From my previous experiences with shared hosting, most hosts will be more concerned about high CPU usage than high bandwidth usage.  So, if you'd just pick one of the optimizations above, it would probably be smarter to go with the caching option first.

In terms of VPS recommendations, I've been using Rackspace Cloud Sites for a number of years.  The service is actually more expensive than most VPS services you can get.  The great thing about Rackspace is that you can get a sys admin on chat support within about 5 seconds, at any time of the day or night.  While they won't actually do coding or touch your site, they'll help you diagnose problems and make recommendations that are really useful.