I'm currently on a cloud server, reseller program with cPanel, but formerly on their VPS plan which they discontinued (w/o cPanel).

Understand that I have to do everything from scratch here, have installed some apps via SSH / command line, so not a total newbie.

1. Do you think the 512mb setup will be adequate with this:

On one IP: A 345-350 page site, each page has 2 php includes (for simple html navbars + footer info). Some have one additional php include for rotating ads, plus a WordPress install for a separate blog. I use an external datafeed aggregator that allows me to easily merge datafeeds from completely different sources. I just paste PHP code on a page to display products.

The other IP has a WP multisite install with a few sites partially developed. These will be smaller sites and also use the external aggregator.

As there were so many SAN outages, my main site traffic dropped drastically, courtesy of the SEs. So high traffic is not a consideration at this point.

2. Should I keep these sites on separate IPs or merge onto one IP?

Thank you for any help!

1. It doesn't matter how many pages you have. Traffic is all that matters. However, make sure you use a good caching plugin for WordPress.

2. Don't waste IPs, you can run a thousand websites on the same IP and it will make no difference whatsoever. I don't think Linode even allows extra IPs unless you need them for SSL.

hybinet, TY for the quick response. Using WP Super Cache on both installations + thanx for the IP info.

Indeed traffic will determine if you can run your setup on a 512, but if you're not sure, start on a 512 anyway. You can easily resize up with only a small downtime if you need more resources.

Ghan_04's suggestion is fantastic. I currently have a total of four Linodes (a 1536, two 1024's and a 512). I started with a single 768 and a single 384. Those two were scaled up as need increased to a 1536 and 1024, with a tertiary 1024 that I brought online this year to handle some static media content.

Scaling up with Linode is painless, and frankly quite fantastic. In the upgrades of the original two each time I simply rebooted my Linode after selecting the upgrade and.. viola, more resources. Migration time took around 30 minutes total, including my testing.

I also feel that a 512 will be more than adequate for your needs, as my smallest Linode also handles quite a bit of work without a hiccup. Plus, you can scale quite quickly.

As an example of scaling, I've gone from around 10,000 pageviews/day on the original two (768 was for Apache, 384 for MySQL) and now am up around a million. Even when there was a large traffic spike - I deployed a new web application - before upgrading, they held up just fine and still served the content.