Cloud / Dedicated hosting - recommendations please

[AKA]

Hi,

I have a number of websites across different shared hosting companies. There are around 20 sites running lamp with modx and magento, a WordPress site and an iPhone and Android app.

These aren't big sites - 156.2 mb - Database size, 810 mb - Database LOG size and 2,226 mb - Web folder size in total. With roughly 15,000 visits and 65,000 pageviews a month in total.

I am just wondering what would be the best hosting for us to go onto? Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

 

[mneylon]

Is there a particular reason you want to move to dedicated / cloud?

 

[AKA]

Is there a particular reason you want to move to dedicated / cloud?

Some of the sites are running very slow and the current development company is blaming the shared hosting they are on. Also, we have a number of sites in development, with a different company, and we need somewhere to put them. I am reluctant to have these sites hosted elsewhere and would like to try and centralise everything. Especially since the number of sites we have will only be increasing over the next 12 months.

Oh and, I am not 100% sure if cloud is the best thing. Just seems everyone is talking about clouds these days!

Thanks,

AKA

 

[mneylon]

Fair enough ..

Cloud - lot of hype around it, but it's not suitable for everyone.
Dedicated server - not suitable for everyone either

The thing with moving to dedicated / cloud is that you need to manage stuff by yourself more
On shared hosting the provider will look after it

But there are plenty of benefits to moving to dedicated or cloud ..

 

[paul]

My personal reasons for picking cloud, with plesk panel, is that it's straight forward enough to install bits, like a version of PHP , Imagemagick, etc, that might not always be an option on a shared host. Also the cloud is nicely expandable, so you can start small and work up.

 

[AKA]

@paul - Yeh, that seems to be a big plus of Cloud, the scalability.

@blacknight - Yes, that is a concern of mine. I would have to go for a managed service so the provider can look after this.

 

[ralph]

With shared hosting, you will not escape the bandwidth problem, as all customers on a host need to funnel their traffic through the same physical network interface.

The tricky part of your question is to find out how much maintenance you really need, and if you wish to be reliant on the management of a shared hosting account via a control panel.

 

[neweb]

I've just gone back to shared hosting after years on dedicated or cloud.

It's too much work to manage the servers. You also need a good bit of server experience to manage them.

Another problem is, if the server goes down you lose everything until you can get the server back up. With shared hosting (over a number of providers) you only have some sites going down and not them all.

Trust me, 20 or 30 calls one after the other because your clients email and sites have gone down is not nice.