Dreamhost Memory Usage on VPS

@mika E

You said:

I have to second Andrew there. 600megs is cutting it close. You’ve got 212 pageviews in a month an a half (so we’ll say 180k a month?) That’s a lot. I’d be running at least a gig on it, since your load is nice and low. If load started spiking with a lot of posts, you’d want to bump that to 2.

I am considering switching to DreamHost since my current host is having “latency issues” slowing several WordPress-based sites from under a second or two page load time to as much as 20 seconds, with no ETA for a resolution to this issue. (This has been an intermittent but recurring problem with that other hosting company for many months now.) But after reading your comment, above, I am having some reservations.

I contacted DreamHost sales via email to ask for a recommendation on hosting plans, and the rep suggested shared hosting. For me, that would be about a dozen separate plans (for that many domains, one domain per shared plan). Combined, these domains probably have less traffic currently than the one site mentioned above. (Depending on how you are defining the traffic, that is. Do you consider all those Far East POSTs to wp-login with user name ‘admin’ and various passwords such as ‘12345’ or ‘password’ to be a page view?)

Would I be better to opt for a VPS plan and host all my domains on a single VPS? And if so, with how much RAM? (I can’t find anything on the DreamHost website which really explains how to determine how much RAM an installation needs. I realize, of course, that that is dependent on what you’re running on the site, but some examples or something would be helpful.)

Or should I jump straight to dedicated server (which to be honest is outside my budget range for these non-profitable sites)?

Any clarification to help determine what’s right for me would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Shared hosting caps out around 500megs I think.

That said, the way we do multiple domains is a little different from other hosts. If you have one account with us, on shared hosting, you can have multiple users and multiple separate domains, all on one hosting. You would end up with all your domains on one server, and if you’re well under the traffic of apticknor, then you’ll probably be okay on shared.

The cool thing, IMO, is that you can start on shared. If you don’t like it, or if you need more power, you can seamlessly move to VPS. But if you’re under 100k pageviews a month for your sites combined, you MAY need VPS, and you may not. A lot of this matters to how you optimize your site, how you cache, and how interactive the site it. If you’re around 50k views, you should be right as rain.

I would put all three under the same username on one shared hosting account. Make ’em all PHP 5.3 (or 5.4), and you can use PageSpeed if you want for extra caching powers.

Oh and this?

Do you consider all those Far East POSTs to wp-login with user name ‘admin’ and various passwords such as ‘12345’ or ‘password’ to be a page view?

Usually not ?? They do impact your memory and CPU though. Most pageview records ignore wp-admin.

@mika E

Thanks for the info. It’s much appreciated. One thing, though. You said:

I would put all three under the same username on one shared hosting account.

But my previous post said I have a dozen (as in 12) sites, not three. Of those, three are “mission-critical,” four are “important” to me, and the rest are “just for fun.” But they total probably less than 20k page hits per month, combined. (One is a rural church, another is a small town auto service garage, etc.) They all use WordPress as the underlying “engine” to make it easier for the users, but they have very little updating going on. A few “blog” posts a month on each maybe.

So what do you suggest? Could a single shared plan handle this many separate WP installations (with all the associated memory overhead)? Or maybe three shared plans with one “critical,” one “important” and one “fun” site on each (more or less)? Or would it be better to jump to VPS for all of them (or maybe 2 separate VPSes with 6 on each) and, if so, at what memory level? Again, we’re not talking a lot of traffic; we’re talking a lot of CPU/RAM for the multiple installs.

One more thing: When DreamHost says “100% uptime guaranteed,” how does DreamHost define “uptime?” My current GoshDarn? hosting service seems to define 20 second page load times as being “up,” even though a week ago the same page loaded in less than 1 second. (With no changes to the site.)

Sorry, I realize this is getting somewhat tangential to the original forum topic, but hopefully not too bad …

Thanks again.

Sorry, I misread. You can still put a dozen, or a hundred, under one shared account the way our system works, but the issue is less the number of sites and more the traffic those sites get. You can have ONE site that’s too massive for a shared host. Without having the specs of your traffic, CPU and memory usage, the best I can say is “It depends on how much you got.”

The numbers are cumulative. If ALL your sites add up to a large amount, then you have your answer ?? If they’re all pretty small, pretty quiet, and pretty low key, you’ll probably be okay.

One more thing: When DreamHost says “100% uptime guaranteed,” how does DreamHost define “uptime?” My current GoshDarn? hosting service seems to define 20 second page load times as being “up,” even though a week ago the same page loaded in less than 1 second. (With no changes to the site.)

Realistically? Uptime is uptime. If your site is slow, it’s still up. Hosts aren’t talking about server speed when we say uptime, we mean your server is up, available, getting power, etc etc.