The Great VPS Con

I’ve been using Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting from various different hosts for my own sites for a few years now. I reckoned I’d outgrown shared hosting and liked the idea of having a server all to myself, expecting performance to be much better without having to share with hundreds or thousands of other sites. Its not really worked out like that though..

I currently have about 10 wordpress based sites on my VPS, only a couple of which might be construed as doing anything weird. They both have a lot of plugins and some decent traffic. But all in all, I wouldnt consider that I’m doing anything on such a massive scale to warrant the downtime and slowness problems I’ve been having for ages now. WordPress can be resource heavy but surely servers should know how to deal with it by now?

The thing that annoys me most is that the same sites didnt cause half as much trouble when they were on shared and if they did, support was available quickly and for FREE. VPS support has to be paid for as its unmanaged. I recently had a client move from my shared reseller hosting to a VPS and straight away he had terrible site/server downtime problems none of which happened on my shared. So while VPS hosting is a lot dearer per month than shared, its shared that seems to have the best specs, performance and support. What exactly are we paying for with a VPS so? Control? Is that even important? You really need to know your stuff if control and editing server settings is your thing.

In short, I think I’d only reccommend VPS hosting if you dont have a large wordpress or cms based site and know your way around server settings, but even then make sure you have your own very good reason for having a VPS rather than just thinking it sounds like a good idea or having your host talk you into it.

I’m hoping to switch back to shared soon.

Leon