Has anyone had specific experience moving from a shared host (godaddy, etc.) to a decent powered dedicated server?

I'm trying to gauge the performance increase I can expect. We will be getting a dedicated server soon and I will be installing and setting up Drupal on it.

If anyone has any experience or test data they've put together I would really appreciate it.

Thanks!

Comments

alexrayu’s picture

Of course, the performance boos is evident. The more heavy your site is and the more load it is experiencing the more difference you will notice.

- Alexei Rayu.

Drupal Related Services | SiteHound 2.5 (based on Drupal 6.6) - Drupal for Beginners! With new, best ever admin theme!

chrisabbato’s picture

Thanks for the reply.

I assume the performance boost will be quite drastic, I was just wondering if anyone had a personal anecdote about their experience. Such as "My pages used to load in 1500 ms and now they're loading in 300ms", etc.

I understand it is all dependent on what server, how many users, how many modules, etc.; I was just wondering in general.

brianmercer’s picture

I went from 1&1 Professional Preview to HotDrupal.com Standard. They are both shared hosting, but it's been a huge difference in site responsiveness. The response time on 1&1 for a small Drupal site without much traffic, but using various modules including taxonomy control access, was averaging around 2500ms. With that same site on Hotdrupal.com it averages about 400ms. I've used site24x7.com for about 9 months before and three months after the move to track that statistic. It's important that my visitors have a great experience on the site, even if there aren't very many of them.

I could only speculate on the reasons for the performance difference (server is less packed, eAccelerator cache, mySQL on the same server, fastCGI PHP, mySQL tweaks specifically for Drupal, more memory available to PHP).

I have no personal experience with a high traffic site, but my experience with a smaller site is that a good quality shared account can be excellent.

chrisabbato’s picture

Thanks for the response.

If the performance increase is that drastic just going from one shared host to another, I can only imagine what our dedicated server will be able to do with all of the possible tweaks setup.

alexrayu’s picture

Anecdote. Oh eah. A lot.

Even the best distributed servers will give "system hiccups". White screens, slowdowns - this may also be dependant upon some client loading the distributed server. Even though there are limites of RAM and processor time for each user, hosters obviously give more RAM and processor time for the total of users than the system ha, hoping that they will not be using their maximums at the same time. And if they do...

An anecdote was when so loudly praised AN hosting auto-suspended the client's account. They have a heavy set, to be sure, but still they were shocked, when instead of having a warning or something, their site was automatically suspended (and down!) by the An Hosting system. What a barbaric method! Well, limit the CPU, limit the RAM, but why on earth take the site down! For some of the customers it's a financial loss. What a brutal way to force to upgrade to a dedicated server!

That's how anecdotic it may turn out. I am not speaking of GoDaddy - working with them is worse then tooth pain.

- Alexei Rayu.

Drupal Related Services | SiteHound 2.5 (based on Drupal 6.6) - Drupal for Beginners! With new, best ever admin theme!

awolfey’s picture

We moved a pretty large site from an ANhosting (midphase) vps to a dedicated, also midphase, and page times went from 3000 to about 200ms on some pages. The vps we were on was very busy. We crashed apache on it a few times but they did not suspend our account for that.

chrisabbato’s picture

Fantastic to hear, my site right now is probably about 1500-2000 ms without any enhancements so I am certainly looking forward to the dedicated server.

(and yes, godaddy sucks, lol)