What's a better option? VPS-2 vs SSD-1?
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That would depend on your traffic, more traffic you have the more bandwidth and RAM you will need. Also depending on your type of content, very heavy image content would use more bandwidth etc.
At least that's my understanding of it.
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This stuff literally depends on exactly what you need this for.
In my case I need MYSQL and Redis for users. Redis is a database base completely in RAM, so 1.5GB would never work for me if each logged in user eats up 10MB of RAM. But at the same time a SSD has no moving parts. I'd go with Solid State Drives all and more RAM, but that's cause I know what I'll be running.
If you are running a wordpress install that generates lots of traffic but have a CDN at some level you really don't need 16 CPUS, and 2.25GB of RAM cause you'll never hit those thresholds, and the likelihood you'll need 75GB for a wordpress install, slim unless you got something eating up disk space like crazy for no reason, but by then you would feel the sluggishness of the overall site immediately.
At the same time the VPS-2 option has 16 CPUs versus 24 CPUs for SSD-1. That means the SSD-1 will process a lot of work a lot faster and spread it out, but it has to be quick short work since it doesn't have that much RAM, but the fact that it is processing faster means the RAM will be freed up faster.
So the question is what are you going to use the server for exactly? Do you have a members area, are you going to be serving native ADs in the near future? Do you have a CDN setup so the bandwidth numbers really don't matter? If you aren't processing anything intensively a 2 core CPU is more than fine, but that's if you took all the necessary steps for speed optimization.
Bandwidth is just the amount of data that you can transfer back and forth for visitors visiting your site. Basically if you have a homepage that is 1MB in total size, then each time a visitor visits your homepage you will be sending them 1MB of data. now at 1GB, that would mean ~1000 visitors can come to your homepage before they get denied cause you ran out of bandwidth.
If you have multiple pages that each take 1MB of data when visited and each visit on average visits 5 pages, that means each visitor eats up 5MB of data. If you only alloted 1GB of bandwidth a month that would mean you could only have 200 visitors coming to your site.
Now here is where things get interesting. If you have that same setup, of 1MB per page, but use your .htaccess file and pagespeed optimization techniques (Day 27 - Page Speed Optimization) that 1MB might get compressed down to 1/2 MB. That would mean 2,000 visitors can now come to your site.
If you take it further and use a CDN (Content Distribution Network), that places your files on their servers, they are the ones now hosting your big files, and each visitor is now using maybe 50-100kb of data, meaning 10,000 to 20,000 visitors can come to your site with that same 1GB allocation.
Basically if you can figure out ways to compress and reduce the amount of data going to your users, you'll be able to go further on the same allocated bandwidth.
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RAM on the other hand is completely different. RAM is the amount of memory that's instantly accessible to the programs running at the current moment. Like RAM in your computer, the more RAM you have, the more programs you can have open and processing stuff. But here is the thing, if you are running a simple wordpress you probably won't even hit 500MB of RAM in any instances of usage, since all your server should be doing is processing visitor requests. If you got simple visitor requests causing 1GB of RAM to be used, you need to get a developer in there to fix that cause that's extremely high. When there is not enough RAM on your computer/server the programs start using your harddrive as temporary storage.
So in the case where you have a regular harddrive versus a SSD (solid state harddrive), you'll see an extreme slowdown in processing and response time. That's why you want to opt for a solid state drive since they are fast cause there are no moving parts in them. So IF you do run out of ram you'd better have a good harddrive so the programs can store data there and read it as fast as possible.
RAM = twice the speed of sounds versus regular Harddrive = snail - when considering speed. solid state drives is up there with RAM speeds. But those are "worse case" scenarios. It's always better to have more RAM just in case, then CONTINUING to rely on your harddrive to make up for not enough memory.
Basically think of RAM as your brain. At any given moment you can memorize a certain amount of stuff which you are need to do your current work. If you can't remember you'll write it down on paper (regular Hard drive / SSD). Now your brain is faster at recalling stuff but if you have to read and write on the paper when your brain is full your overall work gets slowed down. So it's best to store as much info in your brain's memory of what you are currently working on versus having to look at paper and do a ton of back and forth.
In my case I need MYSQL and Redis for users. Redis is a database base completely in RAM, so 1.5GB would never work for me if each logged in user eats up 10MB of RAM. But at the same time a SSD has no moving parts. I'd go with Solid State Drives all and more RAM, but that's cause I know what I'll be running.
If you are running a wordpress install that generates lots of traffic but have a CDN at some level you really don't need 16 CPUS, and 2.25GB of RAM cause you'll never hit those thresholds, and the likelihood you'll need 75GB for a wordpress install, slim unless you got something eating up disk space like crazy for no reason, but by then you would feel the sluggishness of the overall site immediately.
At the same time the VPS-2 option has 16 CPUs versus 24 CPUs for SSD-1. That means the SSD-1 will process a lot of work a lot faster and spread it out, but it has to be quick short work since it doesn't have that much RAM, but the fact that it is processing faster means the RAM will be freed up faster.
So the question is what are you going to use the server for exactly? Do you have a members area, are you going to be serving native ADs in the near future? Do you have a CDN setup so the bandwidth numbers really don't matter? If you aren't processing anything intensively a 2 core CPU is more than fine, but that's if you took all the necessary steps for speed optimization.
Bandwidth is just the amount of data that you can transfer back and forth for visitors visiting your site. Basically if you have a homepage that is 1MB in total size, then each time a visitor visits your homepage you will be sending them 1MB of data. now at 1GB, that would mean ~1000 visitors can come to your homepage before they get denied cause you ran out of bandwidth.
If you have multiple pages that each take 1MB of data when visited and each visit on average visits 5 pages, that means each visitor eats up 5MB of data. If you only alloted 1GB of bandwidth a month that would mean you could only have 200 visitors coming to your site.
Now here is where things get interesting. If you have that same setup, of 1MB per page, but use your .htaccess file and pagespeed optimization techniques (Day 27 - Page Speed Optimization) that 1MB might get compressed down to 1/2 MB. That would mean 2,000 visitors can now come to your site.
If you take it further and use a CDN (Content Distribution Network), that places your files on their servers, they are the ones now hosting your big files, and each visitor is now using maybe 50-100kb of data, meaning 10,000 to 20,000 visitors can come to your site with that same 1GB allocation.
Basically if you can figure out ways to compress and reduce the amount of data going to your users, you'll be able to go further on the same allocated bandwidth.
--
RAM on the other hand is completely different. RAM is the amount of memory that's instantly accessible to the programs running at the current moment. Like RAM in your computer, the more RAM you have, the more programs you can have open and processing stuff. But here is the thing, if you are running a simple wordpress you probably won't even hit 500MB of RAM in any instances of usage, since all your server should be doing is processing visitor requests. If you got simple visitor requests causing 1GB of RAM to be used, you need to get a developer in there to fix that cause that's extremely high. When there is not enough RAM on your computer/server the programs start using your harddrive as temporary storage.
So in the case where you have a regular harddrive versus a SSD (solid state harddrive), you'll see an extreme slowdown in processing and response time. That's why you want to opt for a solid state drive since they are fast cause there are no moving parts in them. So IF you do run out of ram you'd better have a good harddrive so the programs can store data there and read it as fast as possible.
RAM = twice the speed of sounds versus regular Harddrive = snail - when considering speed. solid state drives is up there with RAM speeds. But those are "worse case" scenarios. It's always better to have more RAM just in case, then CONTINUING to rely on your harddrive to make up for not enough memory.
Basically think of RAM as your brain. At any given moment you can memorize a certain amount of stuff which you are need to do your current work. If you can't remember you'll write it down on paper (regular Hard drive / SSD). Now your brain is faster at recalling stuff but if you have to read and write on the paper when your brain is full your overall work gets slowed down. So it's best to store as much info in your brain's memory of what you are currently working on versus having to look at paper and do a ton of back and forth.
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I'm talking about general website operators here, not SaaS owners:
For the typical user, the bandwidth and storage are going to be important because of the little amount of optimization going on, and thousands upon thousands of duplicate images being generated, etc.
For the advanced user, I'd rather have that RAM than the extra CPU power. RAM is going to be the bottleneck when you start traffic leaking. If you know you'll get consistent traffic without large spikes, then the SSD would be fine, but I know built, and he's going to get big blasts of traffic.
For the typical user, the bandwidth and storage are going to be important because of the little amount of optimization going on, and thousands upon thousands of duplicate images being generated, etc.
For the advanced user, I'd rather have that RAM than the extra CPU power. RAM is going to be the bottleneck when you start traffic leaking. If you know you'll get consistent traffic without large spikes, then the SSD would be fine, but I know built, and he's going to get big blasts of traffic.
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The CPU does the actual work. So on the server they are what receives the requests from users and then sends out the requested files to the user's browser. I have no idea why anyone would need 16 or 24 CPUs setup for regular wordpress sites, cause I've got three dozen servers and the highest we got are real 12-core setups with 64GB of RAM and Terabytes of SSD drives.
That 16/24 setup SOUNDS like you will be on a server that has that many cores period. So if your neighbor is using 8 cores constantly 24/7 then you'll only have access to the other 8 cores at any given time. There literally is no need for you to have access to the other cores at the same time.
Using simple examples if a visitor comes to your site and request the homepage from your server (visits the homepage), your server, CPU will process that order, gather all the images, files, and then process any programming stuff (within php) and then sends that to the visitors' browser. Now if you have a lite-weight website everything gets done extremely fast so you get quick response times, like 0.5 seconds for turn around.
Now let's say you have a medium site and the process takes 1 CPU 1 second to turn around all the data for the homepage. If another visitors visits the homepage at the exact same millisecond the current visitor is on since you only have 1 CPU only the first visitor will get served, 2nd visitor has to wait, then get served. (Again this is using extremely simple examples, since most CPUs process stuff in nanoseconds, like 0.010, it's the added latency to the user and their browser that adds up what appears to be the response time for the end user - plus not including stuff like duo-cores, processes and threads, etc.)
So when a website goes viral and the website that's getting slammed with 1,000 visitors in a single minute, and there is only 1 CPU - one worker, that 1CPU will be under a lot of stress to process 1,000 visitors single request of the homepage. Recall the CPU was only able to do 1 request per second. So 1,000 visitors would take 16 mins to respond to all the work. So in a flood from Reddit that's when you see sites completely unresponsive since their CPUs are overworked at the moment.
Now if you have multiple CPUs like 12 cores, those 1,000 visitors get handled in 1.38 minutes, since there are 12 workers. Now obviously no user is going to wait 1.38 mins for a page to load, so that's why CDNs are involved to take the load off of the server's CPUs.
As well, most websites aren't intense enough to take a whole 1 second to process the homepage. You are looking at maybe at MOST 0.20 seconds on an "okay" server. The problem is bad coding can and will increase the response time of the CPU since it has to process more. As well weak internet speeds will further increase the end visitors getting your homepage faster.
It's like going to get some food at a burger joint. If there are 4 cashiers and only you in line, 1 person will take your order while the other 3 wait for more customers. But if there are only 4 cashiers and 200 people in line, it's going to be a rough day for those cashiers... They each have to process about 50 people and get them their food as fast as possible, and got forbid there are some old folks in the mist of everything slowing things down.