From Dedicated Server to VPS

So I’ve been on a dedicated server for ~1 year now, and I constantly notice that every month, we’re using far less than what is allotted to us. If we move down to a VPS server, I can save as much as 40%-50% from what I’m paying right now for a dedicated server, and I’d like to hear your opinion on this issue.

Right now with the dedicated server I get an i.3, 3.2 GHz Dual Core CPU, 2GB DDR3 1333Mhz RAM, 1TB/Month transfer, a 250GB Drive and 250GB back up.

I talked to my hosting’s sales guy and he said that the technicians told him that I’m only using anywhere from 600MB to 1GB of Ram on average.

My monthly bandwith usage is only around 50GBs, and I’m only using 30GB out of my 250GB space.

I’m thinking of moving to a VPS with either: 2GB of RAM and 800GB/mth transfer, or a 1.5GB of RAM with 600GB/mth transfer.

In the past one year, we’ve doubled our average daily page views. So if the same trend continue, I assume that one year from now I’m only going to be using 100GB of transfer and 2GB of RAM. We’re also getting better at configuring the site so that a lot of things are cached, and almost all static contents are on a CDN now, so I actually expect RAM and bandwith usage to drop this month.

Recently I’ve also tried test driving Amazon’s EC2, but I think for now I’d rather keep things simple and use a fully managed hosting.

FYI this is one of the most recent test results that we got:
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/120124_DF_2ZMA1/

Any comments are appreciated.

Depending on your hosting provider, you can usually dynamically scale the VPS without having to move everything so you could increase the allocation as you grow.

VPS’s are fine as long as the hosting provider is good about not over-subscribing the resources and you’ll want to keep an eye on the disk I/O performance, particularly if you are backed by a database. It’s hard to fully utilize dedicated machines anymore and VPS makes total sense (again, some of it may depend on your provider).

These days, even the largest sites run on some form of VPS or other (EC2 came out of Amazon’s actual serving platform for example). so there’s no good reason not to consider it.

Thanks, Patrick.