I seem to have outgrown my hosting
I just spent half an hour on the phone with Bluehost, my web hosting service. In the past, I’ve given them fits with expensive SQL queries and the like, but we were always able to resolve the problem.
This time, however, the verdict was, “You may have outgrown our hosting service.” The random “account suspended” messages you see are triggered by things as innocuous as serving up the favicon. The issue is just too many hits in a short span of time — the site may have just grown too popular. As I glance at the sidebar and see 40+ people here on a Sunday afternoon, it’s hard to argue with them.
They do have a “high CPU” option for twice the price, but they also said “at this rate, it’s a temporary solution for you.” So they suggested that I might want to look into some form of dedicated hosting.
Ugh. Expensive. Advice? Host recommendations? If I go to dedicated hosting, I may actually be obliged to actually push the ads I have on here so they are worth something, which would be annoying.
After taking a thorough backup, I will be upgrading to WordPress 2.1 today, in hopes that this buys me a teeny bit of headroom.
29 Responses to “I seem to have outgrown my hosting”
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1) Speed up moore’s law so that CPUs/bandwidth get faster more quickly than the growth of this blog.
2) I tried a trial of Carpathia hosting last year; they seemed ok, but only I tried them for a week… and then decided to come back in 3 months when my game was ready to go online… 9 months later and it’s still not ready. As I recall, they were a bit pricey, but that would (hopefully) result in better service and up-time.
As a new (within the last 2 months) reader of this blog I can’t help feeling a little bad about finding it. At the same time it seems a “GRATS” is in order.
Brookston
[…] 28, 2007 23:15 I seem to have outgrown my hosting I just spent half an hour on the phone with Bluehost, my web hosting service. In the past, Iāve […]
Do you have WP-Cache running? WP-Cache and WordPress 2.1 combined should help you out. If not, you might try a VPS, they’re fairly reasonable, or a hosted blog at WordPress… TextDrive is a good team, but without further details about your sys load, I don’t think I can offer any more specific help.
Uhm. A few of us are with Dreamhost and never had load problems. I had a bunch of load problem when I was with Canaca.
I don’t know, you can always try. It’s hard to compare services and figure out if it can hold your site.
I highly recommend RealPro Hosting. Check your e-mail.
I recommend site5 to my family and friends, customers and cow-orkers … they’ve got some really good deals, and are not afraid to turn down business that would hurt them or their customers. The $5/month (24-month paid in advance), 55 GB storage, 5 TB transfer per month deal is pretty damned good. no-questions asked money-back guarantee, too.
I pay about $100/month for a machine from servermatrix.com. But, I do other things that help make that worthwhile (I use it for revision control, upload/download with the artists I am working with, etc). I’m not sure what the bandwidth cap is (I have never come close to touching it), but there are no CPU issues or anything, because hey, my machine.
WP-Cache has been installed. Keep an eye out of weirdness — like, I suspect that until I go in and add exceptions all over the place, that lots of the little niceties like recent comments and whatnot will not be updating for any given user.
I’m hosting with Front Range Internet, which I chose by going to college with them. I’m about their LEAST loadful site, but I’ve had no problems (and they have a bunch of big customers and 6 9s of uptime last year.)
Host some obnoxious ads, dude. We’ll forgive you.
[…] WordPress 2.1 today, in hopes that this buys me a teeny bit of headroom. ėźøė¬źø° https://www.raphkoster.com/2007/01/28/i-seem-to-have-outgrown-my-hosting/#comments NYT on the Slamdance aftermath Raph 2007-01-29 02:25 ģģ± | Game talk Heather Chaplin, […]
I’m a real fan of Laughing Squid for hosting. They host Boing Boing so you know they can handle the load.
Have you heard about MediaTemple’s Gridserver?
I use it, works beaut. I think the clustered environment would suit what you are needing…
http://www.mediatemple.net
If you’re looking for hosting, drop me an email. I might be able to provide it at a very reasonable cost to you. I’ll need to know the kind of bandwith that you use on a monthly basis and what your current package is. Also what are you running this site on for an operating system? Anyway, if your interested, send me an email and I will see what I can do.
Derek
I got your back. Join the Uberguilds Network imo. Drop me a line.
Requiem
Administrator, Community Manager
Uberguilds Network
PS – I’m offering you free hosting with 8 core 2 xeon cores/16gb ram for the web frontend and 4 opteron 280 cores/16gb ram with a 6-drive u320 10krpm enterprise raid-10 array dedicated to sql.
Ok, who’s going to throw in boobly serving wenches for free?
I gotcher back, Raph. š
[…] KD! Raph needs a new host! – [Edit Post]https://www.raphkoster.com/2007/01/28/i-seem-to-have-outgrown-my-hosting/ Swoop in, grab him, and, surely, get free advertising from him […]
Raph,
I should be able to set you up with some free hosting. Let me know what kind of bandwidth/space/etc. you’re needing and I can set you something up.
I use Dreamhost for an assortment of sites on their lowest level of service ($7.95/month). Looking at the stats for my most recent month on the most popular site, I would appear to have served 2210433 pages, or around 20GB of data. Given that the app running on that site is in sore need of having queries optimized and caching enabled, I doubt that your needs would cause them to boot you out anytime soon.
(Yes, it’s for pay as opposed to the various people offering you free hosting. But there’s something comforting about paying for services rendered in this sort of venture.)
I use Dreamhost for my blog as well. The only time I ever came close to maxing out my bandwidth allotment was when the Katrina: The Gathering parody spread as a meme; luckily it did so right on the month-to-month trigger so I was only out $30 or so for bandwidth overage. And that was a lot of traffic.
FYI for everyone, the issue is not bandwidth — it’s CPU. It doesn’t make sense to me, but there it is. š Maybe I will make a post about what my current site stats are so people can tell me that no, the issue has got to be a configuration thing. š
Raph,
Look into Hostmysite.com, seriously its worth the time to see what they offer, awesome CS and they scale well.
Raph,
Yeah the whole CPU thing is kinda strange. I’m guessing that your host has an automatic cap and 20% CPU usage…but I’d be very surprised if this site would be using up 20% of any CPU unless your host is using a 486.
That’s the issue — I can’t diagnose it. š
On Thursday, my CPU logs were empty. Starting Friday, they started filling up. And it looks like this:
As you can see, it’s just piling up with errors constantly. Even fetching the favicon is generating a CPU load error. And this is all new — nothing changed from Thursday to Friday.
When I called support, they suggested that the site had just gotten popular enough to tip over somehow. That doesn’t make sense to me though.
Strange.
Is kind of like a DOS attack. Is there any IP in your logs that looks like it’s hitting the site a lot?
Spammers must die!
You may want to check out Nearly Free Speech ( http://www.nearlyfreespeech.net ), the host the BugMeNot uses. They’re always saying that they have CPU to spare because by the time CPU becomes an issue they’ve already had to add a new system for disk reasons.
I don’t know how much bandwidth you use, but their billing is straightforward – No monthly fee whatsoever, $1 per gigabyte transferred, $0.01 per megabyte-month of disk space, and optionally $0.02 per day for unlimited email forwarding; they offer bulk discounts for high-bandwidth sites as well.
I’ve been using them for the past year and have found them to be incredibly knowledgeable and responsive, with email replies within minutes at all hours of the day. Also quite unlike my previous host I haven’t noticed any downtime :).