Hi All,
This is my first posting here, and I'd just like to say that drupal and the drupal community are both excellent!
I have been working on a drupal site for the last couple of months and except for some finishing touches, I'm ready to go live with the site soon.
Based on the postings in this forum and the kind of site that I am building, I think that a virtual dedicated server is the way to go, but before I choose to go down that path I have a few questions I'd really appreciate some feedback on:
1.) How much work is involved in setting up a VDS to get drupal up and running (I assume that the VDS has LAMP installed by default), and how much work is needed to maintain a VDS (patches, site and database backup, tuning/tweaking etc)?
2.) Since I'm already using godaddy for hosting now and I'm pretty happy with that, I thought that choosing one of their VDS plans (https://www.godaddy.com/gdshop/hosting/virtual.asp?ci=9013&display=virtual) would be the easiest solution, but I'm willing to go elsewhere if that is not a good idea. I'm also open to using a shared hosting plan if any exist that has decent drupal performance, anywhere is acceptable as long as the cost is below $40 (USD) a month. Also, the hosting provider I choose should be able to easily scale up the server performance if needed (at additional cost of course).
Thanks in advance and cheers,