How big of a VPS do I need?

[Aiwa]

So I've gotten to the point where I want more control over the hosting environment that some of my boards run on. There are a couple custom plugins I want to run that I can't run on a shared environment and the current hosts are idiots. So I'm consolidating by test board, dev board and 2 live boards onto one VPS.

Obviously dev board and test boards won't have any user activity. There are 5 of them.

Between the 2 live boards, we're only talking 20 users online at a time w/ spikes in the 60's to 70's... Only a total of like 50k posts between them both...

So down to the real question... Do you think I can get away with sticking at 512M or should I just go ahead and push it to 1G?

The VPS is running RAID 10 SSD's. 512M plan gets (2) 3.3ghz cpu cores, and 1G plan gets (4) 3.3ghz cpu cores.

Right now I've got clones of 2 test board and the larger live board on an OpenVZ VPS w/ 256M of RAM... It's running really well holding at about 150M, but it has no activity... I fully expect to have to bump it to 512mb once I redirect the domain...

[Mr.Jake]

I'm also planning to move from shared hosting to VPS or something similar. I am also interested to hear what kind of VPS would be enough in his situation.

[AlexJ]

I would say good VPS hosting with 1GB RAM would do fine if no cpanel installed. 512M sounds tight if you peak 60 users/s

[Grumpy]

Assuming you don't have any control panel like cpanel/plesk, and not going to opt for apache, 512 should work.

[Aiwa]

I would say good VPS hosting with 1GB RAM would do fine if no cpanel installed. 512M sounds tight if you peak 60 users/s

That's exactly what I was thinking...

Assuming you don't have any control panel like cpanel/plesk, and not going to opt for apache, 512 should work.

I've got it set up w/ Apache & Webmin at the moment... Though as I go along I may change that up to increase performance... I have no plans to license the exorbitantly expensive cPanel...

Based on what you both are saying... I may ride w/ a 512 for a couple months and watch stats to see if it's peaking.... If it is peaking it's a seamless upgrade w/ my host to the 1G...

[Grumpy]

A VPS is great because it's always so easy to upgrade, for both parties since its limits are just soft caps.

But, I would suggest away from apache in the front. apache is very memory heavy. You can opt for something like nginx + php-fpm or nginx + apache backend with very low max clients value (like 5~10) instead (though, this option is still more memory heavy than previous). nginx is designed to be low memory usage by default. Apache and php-fpm are both great handlers of PHP, so just passing php to them would net you a lot lower memory usage than just apache in the front.

[Aiwa]

Thanks Grumpy. Ill look I to that.

[Canal World]

We get around 200 online at any one time, recorded peaks of 600 inc guests, and found 1gb tight and are in fact using almost all of 2gb.

Not really done anything to look at resource optimisation, that may not be a fair figure, but its a stab in the dark, on a topic that I found there is not that much info on considering.

I also believe a SSD helps, but again, no experience of that as our chosen host done offer it.


Daniel

[AlexJ]

SSD helps big time if host maintains VPS good. I hosted my same forum on my SSD VPS for testing purpose and results where way faster. I have 3 yrs old dedi server and HD is getting slow, so I am planning to either change machine or go with VPS for forums.

[Aiwa]

I'm on 512 now and I'm pretty consistently hovering around 350-400 and I've only launched 2 of the biggest and most active sites. Still have one more to go live.

I've not looked at the CPU yet to see if more power is needed.

The SSD's my host runs are Samsung 830's. Pretty fast little suckers. They had 840 Pros, but had compatibility issues. So they sold them for a good price, I picked up two. :)

[raindog308]

+1 for nginx + php-fpm.

Apache is fine if you must have every swiss army knife feature, but for basic html + php, nginx is awesome.

[IveLeft...]

Unixy Varnish is excellent

[RapNation]

60 users at a time? 256MB. 512 if you have a few add-ons installed

We are currently using a 512MB VPS

lighttpd + php5 + mysql = using ~220MB with 100 users online right now (only goes up a few MB for more)

had a traffic spike of 700+ users online at once last night and it didn't even flinch

you don't need SSD drives at all, I believe our host is using either 7.2k or 10k drivers in RAID 10

[Aiwa]

I've got it at 512mb for now. Costs me $60/yr. Worth having the head room as we've been installing a few other things on it. Postfix, dovecot, mumble, teamspeak and its acting as a DNS server for one of my domains using BIND, named.

[Makoto]

I've got it at 512mb for now. Costs me $60/yr. Worth having the head room as we've been installing a few other things on it. Postfix, dovecot, mumble, teamspeak and its acting as a DNS server for one of my domains using BIND, named.

It's nice being able to run your own mail server among other things :P

My current server setup is probably a little overkill.

But I use it as a web, IRC, mail, DNS, XMPP, VNC, VPN, seedbox, MariaDB and small Minecraft server. I make pretty good use of it, at least.

[RevengeFNF]

Im using a VPS with 1Gb and nginx + php-fpm. I have peaks of 300 or more users online everyday, and everything runs fine.