When Should I Move from a VPS to a Dedicated Server?

Hello,

Using a VPS from a VPS provider on vps web hosting offers on webmastersun.com

but we still can upgrade to a dedicated server because we can add extra money for our vps package to become a dedicated server.

I have a question: when should I move from a VPS to a dedicated server?

we are hosting around 15 websites on VPS and feeling websites running slowly now.

Waiting for valuable replies

You should move to dedicated server once you have many websites hosted on your web hosting provider that also get a lot of daily hits and there is a lot of activity.

If all those 15 websites generate you 500+ daily clicks each as well as there is some major activity going on (blog posting, forum posting, commenting etc) then you should consider upgrading to a Dedicated Server.

In few words; upgrade to dedicated server once you feel that you need a lot of performance.

You can check your current resources and estimate future resources you will have an idea when you need upgrade to dedicated server.

Check resource usage and if your sites are loading slow, vps resource usage always high, then upgrade to higher vps plan or go with a dedicated server.

rwsorensen said:

I have a question: when should I move from a VPS to a dedicated server?

Click to expand...

It depends on your traffic, RAM and load balance, you need to check this.
If it was overload, you should upgrade to a new VPS with better specs or a dedicated server, it should solve your problem.

rwsorensen said:

Hello,

Using a VPS from a VPS provider on vps web hosting offers on webmastersun.com

but we still can upgrade to a dedicated server because we can add extra money for our vps package to become a dedicated server.

I have a question: when should I move from a VPS to a dedicated server?

we are hosting around 15 websites on VPS and feeling websites running slowly now.

Waiting for valuable replies

Click to expand...

If your websites are running slowly, that doesn't mean you need more resources. There are several factor to improve your website performances, before looking for a dedicated server. At first, you can try to check if the VPS is not enough powerful (slow SSD / bad CPU / oversold VPS ), or if that's the software (php7 ? Mariadb 10.1 ? Caching system ?).

But the performances of a VPS and a dedicated server are almost the same for web hosting, because even with 32GB of RAM and a powerful CPU, your WordPress website will probably not load faster.

To check the server performances, you can use the benchmark tools from my previous cloud hosting benchmark thread, and you can compare with your results.
For the website loading speed, GZIP compression and minified assets are just "Google Friendly" optimization.
For WordPress, using the latest version of php, with mariadb instead of mysql and a caching solution like memcached or redis will have more impact than moving to a dedicated server.
One of my VPS handle 1M+ visitors/month with 2vCores and 4GB RAM. It require to have some knowledge to optimize a server, but you can find almost everything by browsing internet.

rwsorensen said:

What tools do I need to use to check these points?
I enabled Gzip compression, optimized images, minify css/JavaScript but that doesn't help me.

Click to expand...

These points can help a part in improving performance of your server but no more. You need to upgrade to better specs if you want to have a fast server.

rwsorensen said:

I have a question: when should I move from a VPS to a dedicated server?

we are hosting around 15 websites on VPS and feeling websites running slowly now.

Waiting for valuable replies

Click to expand...

If you have a budget for upgrading to a dedicated server, you should do that as soon as you possible.

Anytime is good mate. But if you seriously are looking to expand and need more resources, jump to Dedi right now.

Check your usage, if your websites are not performing well and are slow upgrade to dedicated hosting services.

Once you feel your sites being laggy and slow, its time to move up to a dedi.

Most of the time you will find yourself running oiut of memory for applications thus causing your sites to load extremely slow! That should be the clue to do the jump.

Simple answer is - when you can afford it. For instance my website puts food on my table. It needs to be up, it needs to be fast. I run a web hosting company so what sort of signal would I be sending if our main site was slow? VPS hosting is still essentially shared hosting because you are sharing one of the main bottlenecks when it comes to site performance and that's Disk I/O. I got my E3-1230v2, 16gb memory, 240GB SSD with 500GB backup and control panel for like $160/mo.

rwsorensen said:

I have a question: when should I move from a VPS to a dedicated server?

Click to expand...

You shouldn't

Cloud has established itself over the last 5 years and the majority have moved away from dedicated servers and got onto VPS. Why would you want to go the other way? However, I can understand why you are asking this question but I have to tell you, the answer for better performance is not a dedicated server.

1.> You upgrade to a bigger VPS if you are actually hitting resource limits. That is you are getting Out of Memory warnings or your VPS is constantly at high loads of 2+
2.> If you do not have any of the above resource warnings, then that means, hardware is most likely not the problem, application is. You have to figure out why your application is loading slow. The things is a server doesn't run slow unless it is being heavily used or the application it is running is poorly designed or not optimized.

Please elaborate a little more on your current setup to be able to give you a better reading of the situation.

> What is the configuration of your VPS? (CPU, Memory, HDD, Network)
> What is your average VPS memory usage? (If your provider gives you a console with graphs, you can find it there)
> What is your average VPS Load? (can be found with top command)
> The websites you have, what is average visits daily/monthly
> What application do the websites run on? (eg: WordPress)

I think that OP didn't understand what we asking him about optimization and caching.

Do you have install Memcached, opcache, Varnish etc.?
Did you remove services and programs that you don't need?
What is your VPS spec?
What Control Panel you use ?
What is usage of your CPU and RAM?
How many visitors each website have?
What virtualization your VPS have?
Do you have Wordpress or any other CMS, php or html site?

When you answer on this question you will get right answer do you have/must go on dedicated server, stay on VPS or upgrade you VPS to better VPS.

You probably want to move from a VPS when you notice that CPU + RAM is near 100% at all times.

Size your server for your site(s) PEAK usage loads not just your averages. The usage loads include for all in important backup processes and also restore/recovery processes. Have key performance metrics you want to work within. i.e. if you full site backup time should be less than 5 minutes but takes 120 minutes or if it should take no more than 20 minutes to restore you backups but takes 300 minutes, then you know your current setup isn't adequate.