VPS Hosting & SEO

[roydovaston]

I'd like to gather a few opinions on whether it's worth moving from shared hosting to a VPS?

There are a few advantages of a VPS over Shared Hosting but I wondered what opinions were on whether this is a SEO must do?

My reasoning for it being a good idea is the response time of the web site would probably be quicker which Google would like.

I also thought being on a shared server allows other hosted sites to cause the occasional blip which might drop everyone off your site.

Any opinions?

 

[monaghan]

A VPS is shared infrastructure, so no real advantage over shared in respect of another user causing a blip.

You have 2 fundamental types of VPS, 1 has fixed resource, the other has a share of the host server. To get fast response times on a VPS you need to be buying similar resource levels to a dedicated server so will not really save much (if anything) over a dedicated box. On a shared node, you may well be able to burst to above the resource levels you pay for.

The advantage of a VPS is that you control the configuration, you can do anything (virtually) that you can do on a dedicated box.

The disadvantage of the VPS is that you have a server to manage, all this is taken care of on a shared host.

A good shared host will be as fast if not faster than an average VPS, a cheap VPS is likely to be on a host node that is just as overloaded as a cheap shared host so potentially you could end up with a slower site by moving to a VPS.

You need to look at the value of the sites and work out the relative costs for your particular use. You tend to get what you pay for in the hosting market, so tread with care.

I run both dedicated servers and VPS's, each has it's own merits and I select the platform based on customer requirement.

 

[roydovaston]

Thanks for the more details description. We're ideally looking for a faster, more reliable service than the one we're currently getting on shared hosting. In this case do you think a dedicated server is the right answer? We certainly do not want to commit ourselves into maintaining our own server.

 

[tomas]

Good morning,

A dedicated server doesn't have to be particularly challenging - many providers will sell you a server and leave you to your own devices which is the norm in the industry, but certainly isn't the only option.

I work with easyman - who you've probably seen around as he posts a lot more than me - running primarily shared hosting and dedicated servers. We've been doing it for a long time and one of the things we understand is sometimes people want the benefits of a dedicated server without all of the hassle, so we offer dedicated servers in the same way we manage our own shared hosting servers: we deal with the server upkeep for you and you take advantage of having a dedicated server all to yourself, so nothing except your own sites can cause you stability issues.

I'm sure admin won't mind me mentioning that we've been hosting this forum for the past few months on a dedicated server and we've also made some headway in helping optimise things to speed the site up and provide a more reliable service than has perhaps been seen in the past.

Please PM or email me if you'd like to discuss this further and we'll see what we can come up with for you

Tom

 

[monaghan]

Thanks for the more details description. We're ideally looking for a faster, more reliable service than the one we're currently getting on shared hosting. In this case do you think a dedicated server is the right answer? We certainly do not want to commit ourselves into maintaining our own server.

As suggested before, shared hosting doesn't have to be slow or unreliable

The main issue is cost, you can't sell cheap if you are putting a low number of customers on a server so many companies will overload their servers in the hope they can cope with the load and not get too many issues. (search for "overselling" for more information)

If you don't want to manage a server, there are companies who will offer you a managed server or VPS so all you need to do is logon with a customer or reseller account and they do the rest. There are also others who will manage your server for you if you want to have different management from the hosting company.

If you don't understand server management, I'd strongly advise against an unmanaged VPS or dedicated server as these tend to get hacked if incorrectly setup.