When do you think its time to move to a dedicated server ?

For a simple website it is enough a shared web hosting.

For a community website I can recommend a VPS first, when on the shared hosting this website use too much resource.

The last step is to switch to a dedicated server, when the VPS can't support your website resource requirements.

Note: If your website does not earn so much to recover the monthly hosting cost, that mean you are doing something wrong

dedicated , if you have heavy traffic. take start from shared account, grow to vps and than dedicated and than cluster and than number of clusters and redundancy

That's the recommended path to take

Probably they all want to know that the server is all theirs, like a car: some people simply can't just rent a car when they need it badly a perioad of time or better to try a shared ownership of a car. The ego is hurt I think :rollingeyes:

But when anyone wants much more heavy traffic.Then only he should have to go with dedicated server.

Interesting discussion guys, and very informative if you are on an actual 'dedicated' server, MySQL database size would be limited by the size of your hard drive or the partition (if you dedicate a partition to MySQL) the only time you'd be limited by database size is on a shared or reseller hosting package some companies offer VPS or Semi-Dedicated servers which is basically a more dedicated reseller with usually less than 10 users on it server resources are CPU, memory, hard drive space, and bandwidth (traffic). The 200kb you mentioned relates more to bandwidth. The ones that shared providers penalize the most on are CPU and memory usage. It can also provide him with a learning curve as he picks up skills needed for running a dedicated server in the future.

am having my sites hosted on a shared hosting as they are new and not worth spending much on hosting right now but i will think or plan to switch on to a VPS host once my big project gets final and huge traffic flows in.

If you have a authorised big website and giving you good enough $$ then there is no prob getting a VPS or dedicated server but not untill you are getting good from those websites

I think it concerns little about your traffic. It's about the monthly earnings. If your site earns you thousands of dollars a month, uptime becomes crucial in making the money, it's definitely worth it to invest extra money in ensure your website uptime and reliability, doesn't matter about the traffic.

No, I do not think that is a good move. Dedicated servers cost a lot of money, you need the traffic to justify it.

Regardless of what kind of server you have, if your pages take longer then 5 - 10 seconds to load, its time for an upgrade. And that is after your site and server have been optimized.

dedicated is good if you have a lot of sites. if you can make up the monthly cost across all your sites then go for it. but yea it's really expensive.

I've seen it as cheap as $30 a month tho..but you have to manage it yourself. Some are at $100 a month again still have to manage it yourself. VPS is cheap I've seen it for $19-20 - ok not cheap but reasonable.

Shared you can get for like $5-6