OK, this site is starting to push the limit of what my shared host can do, and they’re requiring me to move to a dedicated server, starting at $150/month — which I can’t afford. And I was going to go with these guys, but in the week I last checked on them, most of their VPS accounts are gone. Lovely…
I’ve got an e-mail into the folks at Dinix (which is run by former execs at my current host) to see what they have to say, and I plan on tweaking the templates and turning off anything unnecessary for this site as soon as possible to lessen the CPU load on the server (it really doesn’t help that MovableType is a bit of a processor hog).
In the meantime, does anybody have a dedicated box just sitting somewhere that could host this site until I can afford a dedicated box? Or does somebody have a crap-load of money they’d like to donate? Hopefully I won’t have to take this site down, but if I can’t round up SOMETHING soon, then it might have to come down while I figure out something.
I’ll keep you posted.
Update on 3/4: Talked to my Web host, as well as the folks at the potential new host. The new host is going to get more VPS servers today, and will e-mail me when they get some.
But for the folks in the comments who were asking for raw stats, here were my Webalizer stats for last month:
Hits: 2368587
Files: 1368094
Pages: 65380
Visits: 22917
KB: 10988373
So my bandwidth isn’t excessively high, it’s my hits, claims my host. Yes, 2-mill is a good pile of hits, but most of that is little small graphics on each page, as well as external calls to various files. In other words, all things considered, it could be a lot worse. And a lot of folks were linking to my images directly, causing me to implement link protection (though it doesn’t work all that great sometimes). But every time an image gets blocked, it still sends a hit through to the logs, and a hit gets counted, despite the fact that only a minimal amount of HTTP headers is getting sent.
They said it wasn’t a particular script or anything that caused them to decide to move me, and they couldn’t really tell me the exact reason for the move, other than the hits issue. Regardless, I’m still planning on doing some tweaks to this template, hopefully speed things up a bit, make rebuilds and comments faster, etc… . I’ve already made PHP includes out of most of my stuff (there are very few MT include tags, if any, on this site, and I’m using MT tags as little as possible), and I’m using the MySQL-version of MT. I’m going to make fewer entries show up on the front page, as well as tweaking my archive options, and probably remove the random quote thingy for now. I’m probably going to tweak my front page a bit to cater towards the shorter entries I generally post, but we’ll have to see how that will work.
Hell, maybe I’ll just revert back to the default MT templates, and start using a kick-ass stylesheet, and maybe that will help things along.
But I will keep everybody here posted as to what’s going on.
Update again: I’ve redone the template, and removed a lot of the extra crap. No more stats bit, no more random quote, replaced or got rid of EVERY graphic file on the page, other than the logo, moved some stuff around, got rid of weekly archives, so things should go fine for now. I’ll update my helpdesk ticket to see if this will keep them at bay for a while until I can get things moved.
Comments
I find movable type very easy on my servers, seeing that it generates plain jane html. The only thing that is slow is rebuilding, having static pages, certainly makes up for the loss.
Of course since you have php (as do I) you loose a lot of the gains, but at least you don’t have to do loads of SQL calls everytime someone loads up your front page. I would say strip out the php, and if you want to do fancy stuff, create MT mods and have it generated into the static html.
How much bandwidth are we talking about anyway? Just interested.
Um yeah, how much CPU/bandwidth are you using? I might have a solution 😉
I’m only using about 10 gigs/month for this site, but it’s over 2,000,000 hits, and it’s also the processor-intensive aspect of things — so they claim, but I’ve tried to make this site as static as possible. Personally, I think it’s all bunk, and my dealings with their helpdesk have sort of shown that. I’ll be updating this post later today with what goes down.
as for the dedicated servers, Rackshack sells theirs for $99/month, and I’ve seen a few plugs at webhostingtalk for companies that sell dedicated servers for $49/month. there’s also a setup fee to contend with, but the ongoing charge is lower than your host’s $150.
i like what you have done with this template. i think you should keep it, no matter if you need to limit the hits or not. it loads a lot better!