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Planning on building a community, be it in the form of a forum or web chat or blog, and planning on being big? Do you invest in shared hosting until you can't hold it any longer, or do you invest in big hardware which should be able to handle the load as it increases over time.

Are you satisfied with IDE hard drives on single CPU with 512mb ram systems, 10mbit network that works now, but might get slower in the future?

Or do you not mind investing money into SCSI setups with dual CPU and at least 2gb ram on a 100mbit or bigger network.

(not taking into consideration how the software might be setup).

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The trade-off in this thread really comes down to control versus cost and how fast measured load is growing. ’s move toward a dedicated environment highlights the operational benefits of full control; and illustrate that a well-tuned application can postpone that cost. The practical decision should be driven by metrics and a clear scaling plan, not by “what feels big” today.

Instrument and watch concrete signals. Useful metrics include:

  • requests/sec and p95/p99 response times,
  • CPU utilization per core and load average interpreted against core count,
  • memory usage and any swap activity,
  • disk I/O wait and queue length,
  • active DB connections and slow-query counts,
  • error rates (5xx) and network throughput.

Common, conservative triggers to consider: sustained high CPU (eg. 70%+ at peak), any persistent swapping, iowait that correlates with latency spikes, or a rising p95 latency and error rate. Those are better indicators than raw uptime or a single “low” load average.

Before buying big iron, exhaust software and architectural levers. Typical steps: add caching (HTTP reverse-proxy and object cache), offload static files to a CDN, tune queries and indexes, introduce asynchronous job processing, and consider separating the database from the web tier or adding read replicas. Scale in stages: profile, optimize, vertically upgrade if necessary, then move to horizontal separation or multiple servers.

A short migration checklist: capture baseline metrics; run a staging load test at 2x expected peak; prepare tested backups and a restore plan; lower DNS TTL before cutover; deploy with monitoring and alerts; have a rollback plan and post-migration checks. Operational best practices—automated deploys, continuous monitoring, and routine capacity reviews—make either shared or dedicated setups much less risky over time.

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Member Avatar for Dani

When I first started DaniWeb, and it wasn't making any income, I put myself on a shared server. Had I know then what I know today, I would not have done it. Reasons include not having a dedicated IP and simply not having the control over my server that I so preciously now cherish.

Since then, I've gone through a series of major server upgrades - everything from a Pentium III to a Dual Xeon. I am now quite comfy on a Dual Xeon 2.8 Ghz with two gigs of RAM and three SCSI drives in a raid 5 array. Server loads average 0.25 (from what I notice), with heavy fluctuations throughout the day. I am hoping that this machine will last me for quite some time. When I finally do outgrow it, my next step is a second similar machine, which could be dedicated to MySQL.

Member Avatar for floris

vBulletin.nl still runs on older shared hosting account but still pulls it all wonderfully.

Member Avatar for Dani

I'm amazed you can run vBulletin.nl on shared hosting. Really! ;) Seriously, though, you should consider moving to dedicated if for no other reason than the SEO benefits.

Member Avatar for Scribbller

Well my own forum which I personally own is small, 600 odd members so its running quite comfortably on a shared server, the bigger one which I mentioned in the other thread (I dont own so I dont pay, just an admin) is hosted on a dual xenon server from server matrix with 2 X 80gb drives and 1024 MB RAM. We started off with a dedicated server but that was a small Pentium III server.

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Well it's good you didn't mention the site because we follow a no-advertisement no-self-promotion no-link policy in this particular forum ;)

Member Avatar for floris

Are those 2x ide 7200 80gb hd's or sata or in raid setup?

Member Avatar for floris

I'm amazed you can run vBulletin.nl on shared hosting. Really! ;) Seriously, though, you should consider moving to dedicated if for no other reason than the SEO benefits.

It runs well because I do my best to run it optimized :) Yes, dedicated hosting is nice, but as the site is sponsored and not really needed, I don't think the sponsor would just want to put in more money if it is not needed.

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