Hosting requirements

[tutmeister]

I'm running phpVMS on Mediatemple's Grid-service, where I have been a customer for 5 years now. I have always noticed latency with database-driven websites there and phpVMS is no different. I have the full navdata and airport SQL imported that I found here on the forum, so especially the schedule search is slow.

However, we've started to get reports (and I have seen first-hand) of our custom kACARS crashing and throwing errors throughout our flights ("the underlying connection was closed"). I'm assuming this has something to do with the .NET keepalive property, but am guessing that the connection is not staying alive due to the nature of the cloud-based hosting, with requests being bounced around internally between the clustered servers.

So my question is, should I upgrade to MediaTemple's VPS hosting or is that overkill for a small phpVMS install? We only have 30 something pilots now and a couple years ago had 1500 active pilots on a custom php application (not at mediatemple). So when we actually open our doors through marketing, we expect a large influx of pilots and want to ensure we future-proof our website now prior to that possibility.

My other question is: Is this something that a hotfix to kACARS could fix? As other than this and a slow loading schedule page due to 23000 airports being loaded, we have no complaints at our current host.

Thank you for your assistance.