Standard Hosting or VPS required?

Do we go for standard hosting or should we get VPS?

I’d recommend a VPS for the flexibility to expand the resources quickly.

How much bandwith is enough?

Let me assume that each page weighs about 5 MB (with scanned documents, images, etc) that should bring the bandwidth to approximately 80,000 MB (for 16000 pageviews). Even if we double the number of visits, it comes to less than 200 GB. Let’s put some more for the Genealogy, local history and bots! That should bring the required bandwidth to around 300 GB. I’d hire a VPS that provide 500 GB bandwidth, even if my required bandwidth is only around 300 GB.

Should we avoid all you can eat hosting providers?

I would. I’d always look for how transparent a webhost is in doing what they say (or write where actual limitations are hidden inside their TOS).

Does anyone run busy’ish sites on standard hosting?

Probably someone with more experience with a standard hosting might answer this. I’ve always recommended a VPS for busier sites.

I run a few sites on shared hosting (the all you can eat variety).

VOodooPress right now gets 8000 visitors / 30000 pages monthly
personal blog 6000 visitors / 30000 pages monthly

The rest of my sites (6 of ’em) don’t amount to much traffic

I just got to the point where I had to get concerned with performance. Using cloudflare and w3tc (cache plugin) I’m still doing fine.

I used to use godaddy, and started seeing performance issues, but they don’t give me a lot of info about what’s going on in the background. I switched to bluehost and can see that my sites are starting to get throttled about 10 minutes out of every hour.

I’m not an expert, but I feel like the numbers I’m seeing might be toward the top end of what can be reliebly done on standard shared hosting.

I do offer a lot of larger file downloads on my personal site (200ish mb). And Those files alone see about 3500 monthly downloads, so that chews up a bit more bandwidth than standard.

Also if you’re running 6 sites at $10 a month, and you can run a VPS with unlimited at $60, the VPS is a better deal in the long run ??

I would find a host that allows easy upgrades from Shared hosting to VPS, just to be prepared.

Thanks for your comments.
I’ll probably end up going for VPS as the money is there initially.

Don’t forget that with VPS you should be able to re-size as your demands require. I’ve built a few sites that experience regular seasonal peak traffic. Using munin and google analytics to monitor performance and traffic, you quickly get a feel for how much resource is required.

I was able to increase the bandwidth for a month for just an extra $10 to accommodate the peak traffic (10k visitors/day ~ 100k pages/day).

So for long term stability for small to medium size ventures, VPS is a good investment.

VPS is a good deal. Some providers offers them for free for 30 days trial, some even for 1 year free trial.

I got a 1 year free trial with Single Core 1GB RAM 20GB HDD and 1TB and 100% uptime from this guide: https://how-to-dos.com/

You might want to see it and save money on hosting. Over a dozen of my wordpress sites are now hosted free for 1 year.

Why spend money with the vps, on it’s management, panels, etc. which will take big part of your time and efforts?
Better get some good shared cPanel hosting with preinstalled WordPress if you run small / medium size website.
For a high traffic and loaded sites, sure, it’s better to have a VPS plan.