What kind of server plan can handle this query load?

I'm launching a new site soon and curious what plan will handle it.

[Troutnut]

I'm going to bring a very fancy new version of my website online within a month or two, and I want to make sure my launch goes smoothly. I'm developing it on an inexpensive shared plan with a quality host.

When I transfer my live domain to the new site, I'll be getting about 5000 pageviews/day right away. Each pageview will have anywhere from 5-80 MySQL queries (average about 20) and some fairly intensive PHP processing. I expect an early traffic spike up to maybe 25K pageviews/day, so during the busiest parts of the busiest days, I might be averaging 10-15 MySQL queries/second.

Right now when I load my most server-intensive page, with 99 queries, I get an average execution time of 0.85 seconds. The shared plan accommodates my bandwidth, disk space, etc, so my decision is strictly about server performance, and I'm a newbie in that area.

My host seems to think I'll need a better plan. They have a VPS plan with a 256mb memory quota, 40gb storage space, 150gb monthly transfer, on a 1000 Megabit NIC. This is much cheaper ($50/month) than a full dedicated server ($229/month). I'll be talking to them about this soon and I want to make sure they don't sell me more than I need.

My basic questions for you guys:

Should my good shared service be sufficient for these needs, or am I right to be looking at this VPS stuff?

What questions should I ask my host's tech support?

[zomega42]

I'd say go with VPS, you can get a plan like that for $35/month. A shared account can probably handle your current traffic, but it will be less reliable and it will not be able to handle it if your traffic doubles.

Incidentally, I suspect that if you're doing 80 queries on one page then you probably need to rewrite your code, there is almost never a need for that sort of thing and it is very intensive.

[Troutnut]

I can probably get the biggest pages down below 50 queries, but certainly not far below that. I'm close to getting all the mileage I can out of joins, and one thing that would really help me here would be subqueries, which I don't have on my shared plan with MySQL 4.0, but I'd have on the VPS with 4.1.

My pages combine way more types of information from the database than 99% of the other database sites I've seen on the web. I've written a full-featured forum for the site which uses about 5 queries per page, so that's the kind of efficiency I'm getting... it's just a lot of information.