Hi everyone, I have a wordpress multisite hosted with hostgator on shared hosting plan, the site receive around 10,000 visits a month hoping for around 20,000 a month by the end of the summer. A average page is around 500 kb in size. My site is a membership site where users sign up to access content. I was wondering if anyone can recommend a new host for me, hostgator has been really slow lately with a lot of 502 bad gateways errors. My budget is around 50, 60 bucks a month, is that realistic? Thanks for taking the time to give your input!
For $50 to $60 a month you can get a nice VPS (Virtual Private Server) at a lot of different hosts that will easily accommodate much more than 20,000 visitors per month. For what you want to do, it will not take long before you are pushing the limits on a basic shared hosting plan. When people are logged in, Wordpress does not use any caching plugins (if you have them installed). That means the code base is going to be running every time if you require people to be logged in to view content. Basic shared hosting is not suitable for that kind of resource usage.
With basic shared hosting not being an option, it looks like you are going to have to look for a higher resource Business shared hosting plan or a VPS.
Do you have experience running a VPS? If not, it can be daunting. If you don’t have any experience, your best option is to go with a managed VPS plan on a host that offers cPanel. If you use cPanel on a VPS, from a webmaster perspective it will be very similar to what you are used to on shared hosting. The operating system and all the necessary web server, database, email, phpMyAdmin, and other software will be pre-installed for you. You will get an email with your log-in credentials and log into WHM (WebHost Manager which is like a parent for cPanel), create a reseller account and then start uploading your website’s files and database and you are up and running. It is pretty simple. If you start getting into custom software installations and compiling, that’s where it gets complex and requires a lot of learning. Using cPanel, it will update some things for you when new software is released. It will manage your OS, web server, email servers, spam trapping, databases, PHP, allowing you to update with a push of a button and stepping through a few simple configuration screens.
I use A Small Orange and recommend them. You could stay with HostGator and get one of their VPS plans. I have read some good things about Linode, but they seem to be geared more to experienced VPS users. It looks like they offer managed services, but it is much more expensive than what you will find elsewhere ($100 a month).
As for Business shared hosting, A Small Orange has Business plans starting at $20 a month. (Other hosts may offer similar plans, I am not sure.) That should easily accommodate 20,000 visitors per month. But if you keep growing your traffic, there will come a time when a VPS is your only option. But until then, there really isn’t much point in spending extra money if you don’t have to. Unless you want a VPS. A 2 core VPS plan will allow you plenty of breathing room to grow your traffic. It depends on whether or not you want to spend the extra money for a VPS and are willing to go through the hassle of moving to a VPS in the future if you need to. If you have the money, you could go with a VPS now and not worry about anything except growing your traffic for quite a while.
And no matter where you are, always keep your own backups of your files and databases.
Wow thanks for the great help! I checked out a small orange vps plan and it looks really interesting. I have no experience running a vps so that it includes cpanel is a big help. i think I have to move my site sooner rather than later (keep getting 502 bad gateway nginx errors more and more).
This is the plan im looking at:
Cores:
2
RAM:
2048MB
Storage:
40GB
Bandwidth:
1000GB
Price:
$50
Is that big enough for the site with room to grow?
Yes, it is big enough with plenty of room to grow. 
you can also check dreamhost they have good reputation for providing reliable hosting services along with 24/7 customer support. for vps they provide one clink install control panel. <snip>
So deciding between knownhost managed vps SSD-2 or wpengine, what do you guys think? Thanks for all the suggestions!