Switching to VPS host - what to know?

I started our on a shared hosting but one of my website’s outgrew this, After a lot of looking around I discovered the best thing for me to do is to switch to a vps, but what do you recommend?

My site is a video tube site and all the video’s are located on the server (approx. 20-30 mb per file). Around 30 – 50 files were added every day. My old hosting was Linux.

Because the shared host couldn’t handle the traffic they shut my site down without telling me, so it took me a couple of days for me to discover my site was down. so I lost probably all my visitors and do not have a clue how many visitors the new site will have..

I had a look at mediatemple because I love the fact that I can easily change settings and make the ram etc bigger, but I don’t really see any difference in gs, dv and ve.

Hope to hear your input! Dominick

p.s. some scripts I use need Zend Optimizer etc, with a vps, is this hard to install?

I use Rackspace Cloud (Cloud Sites, Cloud Files, and Cloud Servers) and Amazon Web Services (EC3, S3 and Cloudfront) for all of my hosting. For less than the price of a VPS you can get a cloud based server that you can set up with load balancing and scale with your traffic. Also, you should definitely be using a CDN to serve those videos. Amazon Cloudfront supports Flash Media Server streaming, or you can host progressive download files there. Excess traffic won’t crash a CDN , since by nature it is distributed across multiple servers and locations. An added benefit is that users will connect to a server close to them (e.g. users in Los Angeles will connect to a server near LAX Airport, users in Tokyo will connect to a server in Hong Kong).

@fillerspace

Thankz, But my site is based on a script who downloads the video’s, and Amazon Web Services isn’t connected to a domainname right, so how am I able to download the trailers via a script and place them in Amazon Web Services if the host and Amazon Web Services aren’t 1 product?

jadove said
@fillerspace Thankz, But my site is based on a script who downloads the video’s, and Amazon Web Services isn’t connected to a domainname right, so how am I able to download the trailers via a script and place them in Amazon Web Services if the host and Amazon Web Services aren’t 1 product?

You can do anything on Amazon that you could do with a VPS . If I understand correctly, what you would do is have your site on Amazon EC2 (like a VPS , but more scalable). Your script would download the videos would be here too, and the videos go to a folder on your EC2 server. Meanwhile, you would set up an Amazon Cloudfront distribution, using that folder on your EC2 server as the origin. You can set up a CNAME like videos.mydomain.com to point at this Cloudfront distribution. Then when someone requests http://videos.mydomain.com/trailers/new-trailer.flv for example, Cloudfront would fetch the file from the directory on your server once, and cache it on dozens of servers around the world, so that subsequent requests never hit your server.