I am currently using a dedi server to host and manage 3 sites/apps below. Spending around $67/month.

1- Small store frontend, gets 10-20 visitors a day.
2- SaaS website, gets 50-70 hits a day
3- Hostbill (for billing/ordering/helpdesk for the above two sites), gets around 10-20 visitors a day.

I don't use wordpress. The store frontend site is PHP and HTML based and has 10 pages. The SaaS is a php script/app and it hardly uses around 500 MB RAM. Am pretty sure Hostbill is the most resource intensive out of these three, but I've never seen it utilizing more than 1 GB RAM.

Obviously the dedi server is under-utilized. And I have decided to move all the sites to VPS and save some money on the monthly fees.

I was thinking on two different setups and I'd appreciate if you can recommend or suggest which one I should go for.

Setup 1:

• 1st VM with 2x vCPU and 2GB RAM for the store frontend and SaaS Script
• 2nd VM with 2x vCPU and 2GB RAM for the Hostbill
• 3rd VM with 2x vCPU and 2GB RAM for DB hosting (to be used bu SaaS script and Hostbill)

OR

Setup 2:

• 1st VM with 3x vCPU and 4GB RAM for the store frontend and the SaaS script. DB will be used within this same server
• 2nd VM with 3x vCPU and 4GB RAM for hostbill app. DB will be used within this same server

Am aware I can host all three sites/apps on a VPS with higher resources or on a VDS. But I have decided to keep the frontend sites and the hostbill (for billing and helpdesk) on separate VMs. That way if I mess up something or if one of the VM goes down, I still have the second VM to let the users know what's going on and update them in a proper way.

I am more inclined towards the first setup but considering the sites are too small my brain is having a hard time to figure out whether it make sense to have a separate VM just for DB. Am interested in knowing what you guys think is more practical option.

Also, this is my first thread in LES. Am still learning the ins and outs of this community. Please be gentle on me in case I have broken any unspoken rules or missed anything.

There are many in the budget market who already offer services at little to no profit in order to keep pushing the sales. There are may be less than 1% of hosts who are talented enough as developers or earn enough to afford a custom billing solution which performs minimal automation without all the bells & whistles present in mass used solutions. A vast majority consisting of sole proprietors & one man show companies will have to make the difficult decision of migrating to a competing solution

Blesta, Hostbill, WISECP, Clientexec & AWBS are some of the well known WHMCS alternatives available.

Which one out of those do you think will replace WHMCS?

What I can see is that in near future things are going to be very difficult particularly for those hosting companies who cater to budget market

1. AMD to get more share of the server market as Intel has really f****d itself really badly with all those vulnerabilities

2. If you are just starting out as a hosting provider then stay far away from WHMCS unless you manage to bag an owned license as a price increase is expected within next 6 to 18 months which could make it more difficult for you to sustain in this highly competitive market. Good alternatives are HostBill if you got enough cash at hand other otherwise starting out with Blesta right now would be a good choice for which you can get an owned license for cheap or can even get it for free as internal license with many hosting companies

3. If you are a vps provider then after the release of Solus.io aka SolusVM v2 you are either going to have to increase pricing or you'll have to switch to alternatives like Proxmox, Virtualizor or VMmanager

4. In the next few years we are also going to see more & more people switching to DirectAdmin or InterWorx from cPanel