Sanity Check: A2 Shared >> Knownhost Managed VPS
Budget: not critical; would pay $200/month if needed
Users: 85% US (all over); 5% Canada; 10% Europe and ROW
Site: PHPBB (no wordpress)
Experience: limited> Mostly cpanel; want managed VPS for sure;
7-day Traffic Level: 1.7 million requests; 172gb transferred; 250k page views; steadily growing.
Other: site is technical and an AI scraper magnet. Cloudflare helps a lot but still get bursts of AI bots.
Been on A2 (now hosting) shared server for 5 years. Was great, but issues keep compounding lately. Recent server issues; 522 times out on Cloudflare; Imunify360 delays that hobble the site; support that defaults to bots, then takes 5-10 hours for first reply; and most recently no solution, ETA on fix, or willingness to turn off Imunify despite site-hobbling delays.
Based on the Wiki and Sticky thread, I'm considering Known Host managed VPS. Sound right? Recommendations on which level plan would be best?
P.S. I tried to follow the questionnaire but get a pop-up that says I need to complete the questionnaire-- if I did this wrong, my apologies, it wasn't for lack of effort/respect for the process...