Not Quite There: VPS versus Shared Hosting for Forums

Although it might not seem obvious at first, moving to a dedicated server for most sites actually involves a reduction in peak capacity. Quality web hosts usually host their sites on high-end servers - eight or more cores, triply mirrored RAID 10 arrays, and high quality monitoring, redundant power supplies and so on. Your first dedicated server is hardly going to be so lavish - you are paying for consistency and freedom. Thus, it can make sense to stick with virtual private servers (VPSes) and high end shared hosting for a time.

A lot of advice I see given to forum and community owners is to 'move to a VPS', as if this is an intrinsically superior option to any shared hosting plan. In some cases a VPS can be the logical step, for a variety of reasons, but it is not intrinsically superior.

In principle, a high-end reseller, semi-dedicated, or other large 'shared' option is selling the same physical thing that a VPS is: A large chunk of a very powerful machine. Either option includes the availability of dedicated IP addresses, high - but not unlimited - resource usage, and in general, a lot of things supporting the use of a great many websites.

Websites being the key word, of course. While any good host peddling large shared accounts will let you have a say in the server's configuration, they are probably not going to let you configure their mailserver, tune MySQL or PHP for your sole specific use, or let you run any server program you desire if at all. In addition to the educational benefit of a VPS, freedoms like these can be immensely valuable.

VPSes come with their own share of headaches. You have to be concerned about their security, rather than trusting it to your host's hopefully experienced technical team. Most hosts sell virtuozzo VPSes rather than Xen due to the ability to oversell, and these are significantly less stable than shared hosts in general and especially intemperate regarding odd configurations, with limited OS compatibility. Xen VPS providers are more stable - but you will pay more for the same level of available resources.

If you don't need the freedom that a VPS provides - in essence, you are just looking for more of the same regarding your hosting needs - then check out your host's reseller or high-end shared packages, rather than a VPS. You may be able to spare yourself a great deal of headache, for all of the benefit, at the same price point.

You might want to do this even if learning how to run a server is a big deal for you - you can always buy a cheaper VPS to learn on while your site grows, moving straight to dedicated and having your VPS experience backing you up. This is a far superior situation to the risk of failing to properly move your site over, missing an important configuration step for whatever reason.

In the end, if your site continues to grow, you will need to move on from shared or virtual servers for the same reason - typically disk write bandwidth. With a particularly active forum or other community based software, your site will be sensitive to others on the same machine making heavy disk usage. When this taxes your sanity or the patience of your host, it's time to get your own server.