Web Hosting: How much resources I need

How much memory I need to serve my sites

[noumaan204]

I am hosting two websites on dreamhost VPS

Fours months ago I had huge traffic (25000 pageviews/day)on one of my website SiteA. and 500 pageviews on SiteB. I used wp-supercache and my sites worked find on 300MB memory on a Virtual Private Server.

Then SiteA's visitors started dropping dramatically and today I have only 1000 to 1500 pageviews a day on that site. SiteB started getting a bit popular and it also have 1000 to 2000 pageviews perday. Despite the fact that my pageviews dropped heavily, and i have not made any changes to my sites except for just two new posts in four months. My webhost is showing downtime. My website would go down and server would start refusing connection several times a day.

now even though my pageviews has dropped nearly 75% but my webhost dreamhost is telling me that I need more memory or else I will continue having trouble with my site going down for a few minutes during memory spikes on my server.

Both sites run on wordpress. Both use minimum plugins, w3-total-cache, Akismet. Both sites serve only text and images. I am having trouble telling the support team that my site is not having a lot of visitors in fact i am loosing visitors really fast. But they just keep telling me that I need to increase memory on my server.

This means that I will be paying a total of $25 per month to serve just 3000 pageviews. I think this is not correct. Can someone please help me figure out whats going on here so that I can fix it? I am comunicating with Dreamhost's support team for a month now and they usually have very static responses they either tell me to read wikipages and follow instructions there (Which I did many times and I have optimized my websites to the best of my understanding) OR increase memory. I do not think I need this much memory to serve just a few thousand pageviews. I would be very thankful if someone can help me figure out hwo to solve this issue.

[piskie]

Sounds like you were on a relatively quiet server that is now getting busier with more users being added and the resources being eaten up.

Many VPS accounts are burstable for Ram and Processor allocation. Probably, the 300mb in your case was burstable but now that the server is getting towards (or even past) fully allocated, that burstable freebie is no longer always available.

[lucy24]

Ask them if they'll let you start from scratch. At dreamhost (and possibly other hosts with similar configurations), the first month is unlimited, so that gives you a chance to see exactly how much memory you're really drawing.

I like their technical support. Even if the answer turns out to be "Nuh-uh, we didn't do it, the problem is at your end" they're nice about it. Then again, I've never had to select the "Help! The world will end if you don't get back to me instantly!" option.

[noumaan204]

Thank you guys.

Do you think I really need 600 MB for just 3-4 thousand pageviews?

[vivalasvegas]

I think 300 mb is a little low. Do you also have CPanel? I know CPanel alone uses about this much to function properly. I use a server monitoring software called Munich on my VPS - it provides many details such as server load at different times of the day. In my experience, a low end VPS like yours will provide less performance than a medium shared plan. I actually have a website that receives weekday traffic around 30,000 uniques/day and it's still hosted on shared with no problems whatsoever. I have another site of comparable traffic volume hosted on VPS and, to get it to work well I had to buy a 2000 mb plan. So maybe you'd be better off using a shared service.

[noumaan204]

vivalasvegas: No I do not have cpanel, dreamhost has its own panel which runs separately.