We recently learned that one of our clients plans to make some large increases to published inventory, with ramp-up beginning in just a few months. This client is currently hosted on a managed VPS instance to help ensure the processing needs of their Magento system don’t interfere with the needs of clients who use shared hosting. They’ve been on the managed VPS for quite a while and it has been a good fit for their needs, but their large inventory comes with a need for image storage, and increasing the VPS hosting plan is not a sustainable solution.
As we were looking at ways to offload their media storage, we decided to look at replacing the provider-managed vps with a VM that we manage, not just for the media, but for the whole site. If you are considering making a similar move, here are some of the things you may want to consider.
1 – Price
As our client’s inventory grows, so does the cost of hosting the product images on the managed VPS. In this case, the planned increases in inventory would have at least doubled hosting prices. By moving to a Cloud-based VM, we are able to provide more storage at the same price.
2 – Expertise
We have systems team skilled in server and networking setup and maintenance, and a web team with decades of experience moving and testing websites. The first part is critical, because we now maintain the server, not just the site instance. If you are a third-party host who is reliant on the system management provided with your client’s managed VPS instance, you’ll want to stick with the VPS.
3 – Scalability
Our client expects increased traffic to come with the increase in inventory, and it’s much easier to increase resource availability on a Cloud-based VM than it is on a managed VPS.
There are many other things to consider, of course, but these will be critical in making your decision.
We moved the client’s test site and live site both to their own VM instance, and we’re happy to report that our customer’s inventory can quadruple before we have to grow their live instance.
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