Believe me, i’ve been through almost every host in the Irish market over the past few years, and plenty out of Ireland too (big rant about Fasthosts is on the cards sometime very soon), but I am actually seeing good results with Blacknight’s VPS.

Just looking at the performance of the VPS account and the sites on it for the level of usage i’m throwing at it, it is holding up very well – as the graphs above would suggest.

Example: three times weekly, one of the sites on the server runs an import from about 200 or so datafeeds, updating about 800k rows in a mysql database as it does, and adds about 10k new rows, as well as copying remote images to the server, and storing them.

Prior to this, the 200 or so datafeeds are grabbed from a remote server, and copied down.

I’ve never noticed any reduction in performance when all these things are going on AND site traffic is as busy as it is. In fact, it seems the more the site is used the site gets faster and faster (I have database caching turned on, and quite agressively too).

So, I really don’t think they’re overselling

I think it’s better to go for a virtual server that has a dedicated amount of RAM per client.

Virtouzzo allows hosting companies to oversell RAM and resources and if you’re paying for “enterprise” this should be part of the deal.

Regards
Gragame

So, if you have your site(s) hosted on a VPS, you can start with a small plan to handle initial traffic, but as time goes on you can easily upgrade your memory / space requirements at will – whilst still having the power to tweak your memory to work in the best way for you.

Google doesn’t want to have to try hard to crawl your sites, so the more memory the better – more site speed = Google happpiness.