We have outgrown our hosting package

[Dave A]

It's official. The Forum SA has outgrown its hosting package.

I've been getting a steady stream of error notifications that the RSS feed generator has exceeded the allowed memory usage since Saturday morning. I think the tipping point was the article on signatures which has a few images in it.

Anyway, this means at some point during the next week I'll be moving our hosting elsewhere. This may lead to me closing posting on the site for 24-48 hours to allow the DNS changes to propogate.

I think it will make the most sense to start the change late on Friday 18 April (that would be late by SA local time). So if you experience the occasional blip in service between now and then, please bear with me. The overload problem itself seems to cause pretty rare disruption to normal site usage outside of the RSS feed, so hopefully any disruptions to service will be tolerable.

[bullfrog]

Good to see the forums growing

Could I ask what hosting environment you're moving too?

Shared, VPS, dedicated?

Might be worthwhile looking at vps or low end dedicated if you aren't moving the site to one of these already.

[Dave A]

I'm still going shared for the time being, but on a package with much more tolerances on processing power. The same hosting service also has reasonable pricing increments as we grow through to VPS and (who knows - maybe one day ) ultimately to dedicated.

I ended up doing a lot of research on Sunday and asked lots of questions before settling on this crowd. Basically, there is now a growth plan. I'll hold back on names until we've seen how the performance goes.

[Marq]

I have been looking around for a better hosting crowd.
If I may ask - who did you decide on in the end and what did you find out there?

[Dave A]

Marq, I'm going to duck giving a name at this point - partly because at this stage I don't know for sure how they are going to shape up - but also because what I need for TFSA might well be very different from what you need for your websites.

One thing that really sunk home for me in my research was that there are definitely different resource requirement profiles for websites, different levels of webmaster experience, and very different "best hosting solutions" based on that.

If you want to work in Rands and be able to resolve issues with local phonecalls, SoftDux and Bullfrog are both hosting providors. I know I would have struggled far more with server issues in the early stages if I had not had Bullfrog available on the end of the line from time to time. You can also explore and ask questions at www.webhostingtalk.co.za.

If you are happy to play in overseas currencies and deal with remote support for your hosting www.webhostingtalk.com is the place to go for questions and answers.

[Marq]

Not a problem. Thanks.

[Dave A]

I'll put some thoughts down on website hosting at some point in the future, I'm sure. I don't know that it will be any new information that isn't available elsewhere, but it does seem to be a bit more of a minefield than one would expect.

[Chatmaster]

Dave, this is fantastic news! If I may ask. How much bandwidth are we using at the moment?

[Dave A]

Not that much bandwidth, really. About 4GB. The limit we hit was demand on processing power. With all my little tweaks this is a fairly demanding app.

[Chatmaster]

With shared hosting I have a feeling you will run into the same problem until you are able to do the dedicated hosting thing or am I wrong? Can't they at least move you to a hosting service that have less resource intensive sites hosted on the same server?

[Dave A]

Can't they at least move you to a hosting service that have less resource intensive sites hosted on the same server?

Basically, that's the idea. Siteground was rather inflexible, but the new crowd seem willing to make a plan to balance the loads.