Will Sugg wrote
I have a question about when to move a client to a dedicated server from shared hosting. According to google analytics, their average pageviews are 7K/day. This can spike to 45K/day for the one weekend per year of their big event. The most complaints I hear from them are around sluggishness for admin procedures (editing text/html mainly). How might a dedicated server help with this, or not?
Also, on the aforementioned weekend, when there were as many as 800 people on the site at once, we were getting "Service Unavailable" messages on a blank screen. I recycled the app pool and asked the provider to increase connections and this solved it.
I guess I need some selling points for them on why it is necessary to pay 10X more for hosting than they are now.
Thanks,
Will Sugg
www.planetmaine.net
Will,
The exact time to upgrade to dedicated, or virtual dedicated hosting is not a hard and fast rule. However, I would say that your client is starting to experience some of the growing pains that I would typically start to direct a user towards a dedicated or virtual dedicated setup.
First of all the Service Unavailable messages are indicators that you are pushing IIS App Pool limits, which take the site down if exceeded. THis is typically a very bad thing for business.
Secondly a dedicated or virtual dedicated environment will get much better overall performance. With NO modifications to my sites, just moving them to a virtual dedicated environment my average page load time went from 1.67 seconds to .7 seconds, which is major, especially since the change is even more dramatic on admin pages.