Thanks for the advice Stephen, Alex and others!
I guess one of the considerations I was making is that I generally have one page sites with contact details to generate sales. If these pages are not generating enough sales, then it is a pure cost each month. Over the last few months, I've reduced the number of domains I have from around 400 to under 300, so the effort to move is reduced.
Is the effort worth the £5 per month (£60 per year), I guess not, but it is time to evaluate such things, as if there was another setup I could use which brought the costs down each month and I am saving more money, then it becomes a more attractive proposition.
I have to admit that Heart's support have been abosolutely fantastic, which is another thing to consider.
I can't agree with price hikes for customers or the justification behind doing so. The cost of providing services is not increasing. Yes, electricity is always getting more expensive but this is offset by cheaper bandwidth pricing and better server density.
Migrating away is not particularly difficult as most providers offer a free transfer/migration service.
However, if everything bar the price is good and you are happy, I'd be inclined to stay put for the sake of £5/month.
When you get to a certain level - competence in understanding things like nameservers, dns etc - and a certain number of sites, then it makes sense to move to a vps. Preferably one running cpanel/whm unless you're a hardcore techie.
It's one step up from a reseller and will give you root access to the server, which is essential if you really want to optimise & speed it up with an optimised apache/mysql config and things like an opcache for php e.g. XCache. Makes a massive difference.
No recommendations. They're all very much alike these days with a similar setup. In saying that I'll be using one from memset in the near future for a standalone ecommerce project.
I agree that VPS is a step up from Reseller Hosting but there are some important consideration points.
- You are responsible for the server in a self-managed/unmanaged environment. This does require a good amount of technical expertise. Yes, a good control panel like cPanel/WHM will help you in managing the server but you need to understand at least the basics for it to run smoothly. Alternatively, choose a managed VPS or a managed addon to get the host's tech team to run it for you.
- All VPSes are not created equal. Yes, there are a number of good providers out there but there's a higher number of bad providers.
You want a VPS provider that is using top of the line hardware. Enterprise RAID hard drives are a must. A good amount of memory is a must. RAID with a BBU is a must. And it's nice for all of that to be from a good brand (Dell / HP / Supermicro) so you are assured of its build quality.
I have seen many datacentres in my time and I've seen a lot of "VPS Hypervisors" that are basically crapped out desktop machines with a bit of RAM, a single hard drive and 100 VMs loaded on them. Then pushed out on lowendtalk for $5 per month and sold as a VPS. Your neighbours on a service like this are likely to be running proxies, scraping scripts and all kinds of stuff you want to stay away from.
