VPS vs shared server

[Sphexi]

Not sure if this is the right forum or not, but I'm curious as to how to compare the performance of two different hosting setups.

Currently I'm hosting with Hostgator, on their shared system. Works great for a personal site that's barely used, but now I'm hosting other sites as well, still very low volume, but things seem slow.

Hostgator offers VPS setups, on a scaled system (1 to 9), 1 being low end and 9 being high end as far as resources allocation. 1 is basically .53ghz, 384MB of memory, 10GB of space and 250GB of bandwidth a month.

Their "shared" hosting offers "unlimited", which as anybody knows isn't really true. At some point my usage would hit a limit as far as CPU share goes and they'd cut me off.

But how can I accurately compare the two setups? The pricing is pretty similar or at least not a whole lot more for the VPS, but there'd be no point if the site didn't speed up a little, or at least not slow down as it grows.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

Start up a VPS and do some benchmarks. It really depends on the specifics of the web applications you are hosting.

I've never heard of running a VPS on Hostgator. They seem low end and gimmicky, a la GoDaddy. I would look around before signing up for a VPS with them. Linode and Slicehost are generally the two favorite VPS hosts I hear about from other programmers. Linode is my personal choice as they seem to always do very well in independent benchmarks. Here's one such benchmark: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison

Prgmr offers an amazing amount of memory for the money, at a bit of a performance reduction from Linode. Often this is a worthwhile tradeoff. However, Prgmr is extremely DIY, and currently they're not accepting new customers.

 

[bhanson]

There are way too many variables here to give a straight answer.

Linode and Slicehost both have very good reputations, Slicehost in particular but they both are unmanaged solutions and will require you to manage a linux box. If you're looking to upgrade for speed reasons, you see VPS as the next logical choice, and have no desire to manage a server then I'd actually recommend against getting a VPS. Unless of course your application will require root access for non-trivial scripts or executables, then you don't really have a choice.

This is actually a good time to demonstrate the complexities of VPS. Hostgator uses Virtuozzo for its VPS platform, Linode uses UML, and Slicehost uses Xen. There are many more platforms and each work very differently. Virtuozzo shares a kernel and iptables so it only provides a very minimal level of virtualization; it's impossible to see the individual resources for your VM. You also cannot upgrade the kernel since it is shared. Xen uses a more "true" virtualization (similar to VMware) and each VM appears as it's own dedicated box. You can upgrade the kernel, iptables, and pretty much do anything.

I highly recommend if you're just looking into more performance then you go with a host that is performance orientated. MediaLayer comes to mind and they have a very good reputation for having excellent performance. They're a little bit more expensive, but in web hosting you get what you pay for.

It really just depends on what types of websites you're hosting and the level of involvement you desire.

(Sorry for this fragmented piece of crap bit of English, but my Starcraft 2 beta key just came in so I don't have time to fix it right now. )