Eek! Dedicated Server?

[David]

As you probably know by now, I host all my websites using a reseller account at Clook.co.uk, including CADTutor.net, which I moved there from Fasthosts in August this year. Month-on-month, CADTutor has been growing steadily and I was soon going to have to move up to the next hosting level.

Although I was aware of this, I was unprepared for the email I received today from Jim at Clook. I had noticed that my server, Butler, had been giving load warnings recently, no obvious problems but I noticed that yellow light in the server stats page a few times. It turns out that I am the culprit. :">

Jim has suggested that I need a dedicated server in order to manage CADTutor within resource. I felt this was a bit drastic and a massive step for me, especially considering the cost.

I'd like to stay with Clook because their service and flexibility are the best I've come across so I've asked Jim to come up with a reasonable solution (one that I can afford). I have mentioned the possibility of sponsorship - I doubt they'll be interested but it may be worth something for them to have three quarters of a million unique visitors seeing their advert every month.

I'll let you know how it goes. :(

[James]

Sounds like they're giving it the personal touch though David. Personally I'm always prepared to pay a little extra for excellent customer service. Let us know.

[francis]

Ooh, scary stuff. A lot of people use Media Temple (http://www.mediatemple.net/), and I've seen plenty of sites badged with their logo, so I wonder if they do sponsorship? But, it would be good to keep it with someone you know and, maybe come to some mutual agreement on sponsorship - especially with that level of hits.

[David]

Well, I've decided to take this upgrade thing in incremental steps. I really didn't feel that CADTutor justified a whole server to itself so I'm going for a virtual private server. That way I can monitor my own CPU and RAM resources and see just what is required (oh, and it's a lot cheaper). I'm starting off on a vps-1 with Clook. Moving up the scale from there is easy. I'm going to be moving the whole reseller account across over the weekend - the account will be copied at 10pm Friday and that leaves the weekend for all the DNS to resolve.

I'll be closing this forum on Friday before 10pm because any posts made after that time and before the DNS changes would be lost.

Wish me luck.

[James]

So what bandwidth are you using then David? CADTutor is not graphics heavy is it? My site is using 1GB every 4 days but performance remains excellent and Fasthosts have not said a word.

[David]

Bandwidth on CADTutor is over 1GB per day but that is not the issue. Apparently, the thing that causes the biggest load on the server is the number of hits and the scripts that are running. Since there are so many visitors to the site and the forum, the server load is high dispite that fact that the bandwidth is only moderate.

The new VPS accound was set up today and the whole thing is a bit mind boggling in its complexity although most of the options I'll never need. Once the existing domains are moved over on Friday night and the DNS has propogated over the weekend, I will be able to monitor the server load for myself.

I had no complaints about load from Fasthosts when the site was hosted there but the performance here at Clook is much better. My guess is that Fasthosts were throttling resources to the site, causing it to run more slowly. PHP and MySQL performance was particularly poor at Fasthosts - although I didn't realise that until I moved.

I'll let you know how it goes.