mlemos - 6:45 pm on Nov 5, 2009 (gmt 0)

I am afraid you misundertood my comment. You do not need a VPS. It is that with a VPS you have all the freedom to rebuild and optimize your Web server without relying on the good will of you hosting company.

Most shared hosting companies will not tune things if you ask them because you are paying low fees. You get what you pay for.

You can perform some tuning of OpenX on shared hosting adjusting its configuration to avoid hitting the database so much.

Still ad serving is not a light task and shared hosting is not the right option for that purpose once you start getting good traffic.

As for your claim of those that afford VPS not using Open Source, that is totally ridiculous.

PHP is Open Source and totally dominates the Web. To not go any further, Facebook runs on PHP and they have whole data centers full of dedicated servers running PHP. They use PHP because PHP works well, as it was thought for Web applications since 15 years ago.

Of course they use tuned servers because they know how to do it and since they run dedicated servers they can configure the way they want them.

Your problem is that you cannot afford more than shared hosting and your hosting company will not let you tune the server for ad serving or other heavy tasks.

In that case, hiring an hosted solution as of OpenX or Google AdManager may be more suitable for you if you already have a reasonable ad serving volume.