I signed up for Cloudways Flexible Managed VPS and will be experimenting with running the site on a server from Digital Ocean. In theory it should perform better than the shared hosting.

I picked a San Francisco data center. I ran some tests on globalping.io and it seems like that would be the better compromise with US and Japan being the top two countries where users connect from. With SFO I have a ping of ~110 for Japan, sub-100 for US obviously, and ~150 for Germany. If I picked a datacenter in Europe the ping was ~230 for Japan. So it seems like West Coast US datacenter would be best.

Server is 2GB RAM, 2 vCPU. That would be almost the same as I currently pay for shared hosting on HostGator. I have no idea if it will really perform better though. According to ChatGPT it will "crush" a shared hosting but I really don't know. I guess the plus side is with the Managed VPS I can scale up if necessary.

I'm not experienced in backend / linux server kinda things at all, besides the simple Docker setup I have for development. So any and all advice is welcome, let me know if you have any tips or gotchas about moving to a VPS Managed server.