Best upgrade option from VPS Level 7

Lewis Theobald

New Member
Hi everyone!

I'm currently hosted on the VPS level 7, but our server response time is quite sluggish and although it's relatively fast (roughly 0.3 seconds), we'd like to improve on it. We've optimised WHM by disabling all unnecessary features, email options, services, but it didn't seem to make much difference.

What is the best advised upgrade option from a VPS and is it relatively straight forward to migrate from one package to another? Should we consider just upgrading our VPS over a dedicated?

Appreciate any help!

Thanks,
Lewis
 
Lewis,

There's honestly several options for you, a lot depends on what the "slow" point is now for your site. Is it caused by a lot of traffic, a lot of backend database work etc.

If you don't need a lot of disk space then SSD's might be an option, otherwise if you need a lot of disk space then a dedicated server with a SSD & spinning disk would work. This would allow you to place critical access files on the SSD and everything else on the Spinning disks.

Once you get down to this level of optimization it can get tricky to see "substantial" speed increases from each change. Perhaps adding Nginx or swapping to LiteSpeed might give you another .05 increase in speed (or could be as small as .02) it's all about finding that balance.
 
Hi Daniel,

Thanks for the reply! I think the issue is coming down to a combination of more traffic spread over more domains that we're hosting. The software we use is bespoke made and I'm always very over-cautious thus try to optimise it wherever possible.

We're currently only using about 10/15% of the disk space and I don't see that dramatically increasing. So that could be a potential area that we'd look into.

Does Nginx replace Apache similar to LiteSpeed? We have looked at LiteSpeed previously due to its nice cache integration with Memcached. If we switch over to Nginx/LiteSpeed, is there anything we'll need to do?

Thank you again.
Lewis
 
Nginx would work with Apache as a reverse proxy to help cache static content, whereas LiteSpeed would completely replace Apache.

I'm sure you could run Nginx + LiteSpeed but it's not recommended as LiteSpeed does as much as apache.


Since your running custom made software, if it has a database competent you would see a benefit from SSD just simply for the fact that it will process that DB call much more quickly.

Something else to look at is tools.pingdom.com and gtmetrix.com which offers some pretty good analysis.

Finally also looking into using a CDN or CloudFlare, I wouldn't recommend and paid versions for anything your currently describing but the free version does take some load off your server and speed up load times, but you'll want to test it first as some sites work better on CloudFlare than others.
 
That's great. I did some research into LiteSpeed and that seems fairly straight forward to port over to, so I'll migrate and see what I can tweak.

Am I able to upgrade my VPS with just the addition of SSD, or do I need to migrate over to a SSD-VPS?

We score 100/100 on pingdom, gmetrix, but they don't take into account the DNS response times, server responses or any load metrics. All our static content is served through CloudFront and everything is optimised, compressed and cached.
 
If your VPS is in our Texas center we can simply migrate you over to a SSD package. If you are in on of our other datacenters then you would have to migrate over to our TX facility to take advantage of the SSD packages.

It is indeed very difficult to score that high on those reports so it sounds like you're definitely on the right track with things. SSD most likely will give you an extra boost and then it just depends on looking into LiteSpeed perhaps for the caching or even adding additional globally dispersed name server's to help shorten dns lookup times.
 
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