7 months on ishosting vps for client sites
I've been running a few client sites on HostGator shared hosting for about three years. it was fine at first. then i had more than 4-5 wordpress sites on the same plan and everything started crawling. kept tripping their cpu limit and they'd throttle the account, sometimes serving a stale cached copy of the site. page load times went from 2 seconds to 8-10 on busy days. support kept telling me to "optimize my plugins" which yeah sure but the underlying issue was clearly resource limits on shared hosting
Finally pulled the trigger on a VPS back in november. no idea why i waited. looked at a bunch of options, digitalocean, hetzner, vultr, ishosting. ended up going with ishosting mostly because they had a US node close to where most of my clients' customers are. picked their NY location among Tampa, Chicago, Dallas and LA in the US. $21.24/mo on annual for Medium plan, 3 cores, 4 gigs of ram, 40 gig nvme. the flat bandwidth, no surprise overage
the migration was honestly the hardest part. took all weekend. moving everything over, setting up nginx, getting SSL sorted, configuring wordpress on the new stack. if youre used to cpanel this is a real learning curve. nobody talks about how much time the initial setup takes when they recommend "just get a VPS"
would not recommend doing this on a friday night.
seven months in though, page loads are consistently under 1.5 seconds across all sites. haven't had a single downtime incident that I noticed. control panel is bare bones. does the job. my one real complaint is the docs are pretty thin if youre new to server stuff, I had to figure out a lot of config from random digitalocean tutorials instead, which works but isnt ideal
afterall the move made sense the second the client sites started pulling real traffic. spent way too long second-guessing which was the best VPS provider for my case. for US-east stuff the node location ended up mattering way more than the brand for me. anyone pick based on something other than location?