[damien_ls]

Hi jacob.

The performance that you see with a shared hosting service varies about as much (from host to host) as the performance that you will see with a VPS hosting service.

In theory, you should see better performance from either type of hosting plan if you purchase a larger package. I say in theory, because this assumes that the hosting provider looks at the capabilities of the hardware they're providing, and compares this with the number of x plans they put on that server.

In reality, there are many providers out there who will oversubscribe their servers and therefore as soon as you need to do any processing you will find performance problems.

Thinking specifically about a VPS, you have to be careful about comparisons here. There are numerous different platforms available, and they're not all born equal - some have a higher overhead (just for the VPS software itself) than others.

Personally, we have a lot of experience with SWsoft's Virtuozzo platform. This is low-level, and has a low overhead, which results in the best server utilization - i.e. most of the time the server is working on VPS processes rather than wasting effort in context switching between VPS's etc.

So, let's assume that we're comparing VPS's all using the same platform...

Now we're back to the beginning - the factor is the amount of VPS's running on your server, and of course what processing demands they have (as well as the specification of the underlying hardware).

The above is exactly the same as with shared hosting... if nobody else on your server has significant processing demands then you can (potentially) hog most of the processing power.

So what's the advantage of a VPS for your scenario...?

Although the factors affecting performance for Shared and VPS hosting are largely the same, VPS's (Virtuozzo ones at least) give you some guaranteed amount of resource - you get a proper slice of the server.

For example, a VPS may include a guaranteed amount of memory; Virtuozzo VPS's may also offer burstable memory.

You should really think about a VPS as a mini dedicated server - if you are struggling on a shared hosting plan at the moment, you may be thinking that a dedicated server would be the answer (you would get a whole serer to yourself!), but can't afford/justify the costs associated with this.

A VPS is the natural answer as it (generally!) provides more resources than a shared hosting plan, but not quite as much as a full dedicated server.

I would advise that you are careful though, as a low-end VPS plan may actually give you worse performance than a shared hosting plan. Don't forget that whatever memory allocation your VPS plan has will need to run all operations within that (e.g. MySQL, Apache etc.)...

FYI: Our US based servers are located in a datacenter in Clifton, NJ - you may want to take a look.