Thinking of going from Shared Hosting to VPS

[Unimatic1140]

Hi everyone, I currently run a website with a heavily used forum on a shared server at another hosting company. We use 17gb of disk space and have an average bandwidth now of 300gb per month. The site seems to be growing I'm also planning on starting a new website which eventually will have heavy forum and bandwidth usage as well but of course it will take some time for the new site to grow.

So my questions are:

#1 I am a software developer and developed the entire website in Perl. Web Programming and running the site isn't an issue. What is an issue is I have no idea how to manage a web server. Does the level 3 or 4 VPS with cPanel fully managed option mean that all of the server management is done by HostGator? Will I need to worry about anything else besides running my website? Does Hostgator monitor if the server goes down at 2am and will restart it? What about security upgrades?

#2 Would level 3 or 4 be overkill for a 300gb bandwidth a month website?

Thanks everyone for your assistance.

[doulos]

Considering you only get 500Gb bw with level 3, and since you are going to add another site which will eventually need lots of bw also, I'd say "no" it is not overkill. I don't know it level 3 will provide enough CPU, or RAM, though.

I have a very large forum (on a reseller account) that uses excessive CPU while doing an update to the db. I have been blocked from running scripts a couple of times on that site. Customer was going nutso, I thought I was done-for so I eventually moved that site to a VPS (level 3) - no problems, so far. I had a dedi for a couple months to calm the customer down while I was working on these problems and, wow, blazing fast. Wish I could afford it, but had to go VPS.

Just as a side note, if you are going from shared to VPS you will love it. Awesome performance compared to shared or reseller, IMO. I had a dedi for a couple months while I was working these problems and, wow, wish I could afford it, but had to go VPS.

[Unimatic1140]

Thank you doulos for you response. I've taken the plunge and set up a Level 4 VPS account. So far so go, files are transferring via FTP just fine, MySql Database went perfectly, Perl scripts seem to be working the same with nearly no changes and images do load faster than at the old host. Of course its only me using the system resources, but so far so good.

Tech support has been extremely helpful and accurate. I'm impressed with Hostgator so far!