Moving from a shared to a VPS

[dj4389]

At present I have a site that is on a shared server, and has now outgrown itself. So I'm looking to moving it to a VPS.

I have been getting warning emails in recent months that the bandwidth will be exceeded. Only last weekend it actually went down without any prior warning. The bandwidth was set at 20GB (I have a lot of images on the site, as well as a popular forum). I contacted my host company about it, and they increased the bandwidth, but they warned me that they couldn't keep increasing it at the expense of other sites.

However, I haven't a clue as to what I should be looking for apart from price. I feel that I'm a newbie where this is concerned, and appreciate that it's going to be a learning curve, with all the techie jargon.

Once Ive chosen the company, how easy are they to set up? I would also like some help moving the forum to the new site, as the last time I tried, the forum was offline for around a week till it was sorted.

So can any of you guys give me some advice, and maybe help with the move.

Once the VPS is set up, I plan to offer hosting so I can recover some of the cost towards the VPS up keep.

[freezea]

Depends on the website you have, and your budget. I also moved recently to a VPS. Most important thing for me is the ram. I have 712mb ram for my vps because a) there was a double-ram offer in the offers section b) budget of 30$+ c)My site is using 400mb, and 300mb unused is a safe buffer.

[speed]

As you say you are a newbie you should be looking for managed solutions, if you don't go managed then you need an understanding of the OS, securing the server, configuring it and so on. Those are jobs your shared hosting company is currently doing for you.

You will probably also need to consider backups, your shared host most likely takes some sort of site backups, I hope, so you need to implement something if the VPS provider doesn't. Same host backups are pretty much useless so you need off server/off site assuming the data is important to you.

Moving, if you have a managed VPS then they may well do the move for you.

We have shared hosting clients using 20GB+ of bandwidth a month and it's not a problem, however if your scripts are resource hungry then it can be an issue so with that in mind make sure your VPS provider offers a path to a larger VPS, more CPU & RAM, and then ideally offers a path to a dedicated server should you get to that stage. It makes it easier if you can just ask them to upgrade you and it's just done.

I would look for a minimum of 512MB RAM guaranteed RAM on the VPS.