When to move to dedicated hosting

If I can afford it, should I make the plunge?

[Nick Jachelson]

My site now gets close to 6,000 hits/day and the traffic is growing at about 7% week-over-week. I'm still using really cheap shared hosting with real limitations on the bandwidth and space. Yet, I managed to sneak past those so far by optimizing my content with a lot of CSS and even wrote a custom file system to compress my content and stay within the storage limits.

Right now I have pretty descent income from AdSense, and I'm only spending about 1.5% of it on hosting each month. I could easily get a dedicated server, while still spending less than 20% of my earnings for hosting.

On the other hand, should I really want to fix it if it isn't broken (yet)?

[4specs]

Start to plan for the move - find a better shared environment (ie not cheap host) and duplicate your site there under a different domain - perhaps a .us rather than a .com. Put up a complete block in robots.txt, and make sure the entire site works.

The move may not be as simple as you think, especially for any cgi's and cms's.

Look to pay $30 or so for a great host. Once stable and working, shift domains.

With 6,000 hits (I assume you mean visitors) you should be able to fit into an upper shared environment, esp since you are compressing html.