Web hosting changes – how is it for you?

This website is on shared hosting. For those who don’t know, that means that a number of websites all share one server. It’s cost-effective and works well providing no individual site hogs the resources.

Unfortunately a number times in recent months I noticed a severe slowdown at peak times in the US where the server is located. “Static” pages loaded as normal. But the blog section (which is WordPress and so PHP-based) didn’t. Those pages could take up to 30 seconds to appear and writing a new post was a nightmare. No doubt part of this is down to the number of people who run WordPress now. I understand it’s a bit of a resource-hog itself.

Luckily the hosting company has been moving people over to shared hosting which uses something called Cloud Linux. This gives each customer a set share of the resources and a puts a limit on how much they can use.

So, on 14 October, I moved over to one of the Cloud Linux servers and hopefully now you’re enjoying a better experience browsing the pages. I know I am!

The downside could be if a large number of people try to play videos at once and I’m uncertain how many can view simultaneously before it causes a slowdown.

In fact video views went through the roof in July when the site burnt through 384Gb of bandwidth, compared to just 13Gb in May. 183Gb were consumed in September and 49Gb so far this month.

The Julia Grant interview and video of the World Naked Bike Ride 2011 have been extremely popular.

If you experience any problems please contact me and let me know.

Of course a completely separate dedicated server would be lovely. But at $99 per month that isn’t going to happen anytime soon.


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