From Shared to Dedicated Server Question

I have a whitehat site that gets a good amount of traffic. It is a forum based site. I use GoDaddy shared server but site traffic has picked up to the point where the site does not function properly because there are too many active connections to the database (GoDaddy does not offer unlimited connections to database). So I'm thinking about renting a dedicated server and moving my site to it. My question though is how big of a transition is that for someone?
GoDaddy said they provide security for shared server users but for dedicated server users you need to do your own security. I want to make sure I understand what the changes are before I screw up my site by moving it too quickly without enough knowledge.

Thanks all.

How hard it is to move your site itself depends a lot on how it's set up ATM. Although a backup/restore of your website and a mysqldump/import of your database(s) should be pretty straightforward in most cases.

Make sure your dedicated server has some sort of server control panel (I'm thinking almost all dedicated servers you get these days will). Some of my servers use CPanel and while I think it's clunky and dated, it does handle security and other system maintenance issues without you having to be a Linux guru.

Just as an aside, you must either be getting a lot of traffic or Godaddy must be limiting the connections really severely for you to be hitting the connection limit. Or there's something basically wrong with the way your software is accessing the DB. Often you'll find that a little optimizing of your DB queries will make a huge difference. A single query than locks a major table and runs for more than 5~10 seconds can cause major problems, one of them being a connection limit issue.

Thanks for the reply. They told me that there cannot be more than 200 active database connections at a point in time. I was on the phone with them arguing for 30 minutes about what "unlimited" hosting really meant.

nam6641 said:

Thanks for the reply. They told me that there cannot be more than 200 active database connections at a point in time. I was on the phone with them arguing for 30 minutes about what "unlimited" hosting really meant.

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If you are "just passing" that limit, 200 concurrent connections is quite easy to handle on a VPS.

If you aren't familiar with the server environment yourself for security and all, I'd recommend going with LiquidWeb or someone else who provides managed hosting.