Web Blog of Greg Mathews

When discussing web sites, we all talk about getting the content right, this in turn leads to better chance of getting traffic and obviously planning the content is important.

One thing that doesn’t appear to be mentioned that often and can be extremely important if the content does its job and attracts a lot of content and that is planning how you are going to host your site, and being prepared for whats ahead.

If your site is busy, this could be because it gets a lot of traffic and/or is dynamic so uses more resources than a basic static site then you need to monitor the server hosting your site to ensure that you are not going to run out of ‘allowed’ resources.

There are a lot of people that happily host their sites on free hosting, generally this is OK for personal sites but nothing more in my opinion as you are normally restricted enourmousley and many insist on their own ads being displayed. I have not used free hosting for a good 12 years now but I do remember how slow the site used to be when hosted on geocities just because of the large number of sites that they host on a single server.

Most people opt for paid for ‘Virtual’ hosting, this is when your site is hosted on the same server as other sites, the number of other sites you share your server with varies between different hosting companies, when I worked for a hosting company back in the late 90’s we had around 200 customers per server. These are a great way to host a new site, it is cheap and you have more flexibility than the free hosting. The one problem is you have no control over the resources that other users are using, so you need to monitor your site, if there are a large number of users trying to use the same resources, your site could ‘break’ at times, although for a good number of sites this is very rare and Virtual hosting is all they will ever need.

Larger busier sites go for ‘Dedicated’ hosting, this is the next step if you out grow ‘Virtual’ hosting, the problem with dedicated is it can be expensive compared to Virtual hosting but this is far outweighed by the fact you have total control, it’s like being able to go skinny dipping in your own swimming pool in the garden but you try doing it at the local swimming baths:)

Remember the amount of bandwidth a host offers you is not the be all and end all, if you have any type of dynamic site that uses the server rather than the browser to generate what the user see’s it is going to use resources. Also remember that hosting companies offer bandwidth allowance that they know that 99% of site will never need. So just because your host is giving you 100GB/month bandwidth and you are only using 1GB/month doesn’t mean the hosting you have is OK for your site.

Is your site slow and using a linux server, if you have ssh access to your server log in and at the command prompt type :

top

In the top left you should see the words load average followed by 3 numbers, generally these should not be much higher than the number of processors the server has, ie 1 on a server with a single processor. If all three are high then you have a server that could be getting overloaded, if so monitor it over a period of a couple of days at different times, and if things do not improve you need to look at getting off that server, be it to another virtual hosting server or if your site requires it a dedicated server.

Remember though if it is your site that is causing the high load, you may be better to find out why and tweak your site to reduce the load, this could save you a lot of money in the end.

If you get like me then it becomes a nightmare, I currently have 3 dedicated servers, networked together to run my site, 2 web servers and one db server. I need to expand this even further and asked 3 hosting companies for a quote, hostgator.com said they can’t help and only offer ‘off the shelf’ dedicated server packages. The other two have both said they can help and will give me a quote after looking at my requirements, well 2 or 3 days later I still have no quote, is it that hard to do?