As I have documented extensively over the last three days, cncpics.com has been causing me a lot of grief. To re-cap, the mega post of photo’s combined with a failed cron job several weeks ago combined in a ‘perfect storm’ to seriously annoy the godaddy network admins.
I had three choices.
1 – find a new and inexpensive host and hope that they would be able to deal with the traffic that came their way.
2 – give up and walk away from something that I have put serious time/effort and passion into for many years
3 – do it correctly and get a (virtual) dedicated server to handle the load and fix the issues.
Obviously I chose to walk away from it. NOT.
Initially, because it was cheap and had a good reputation, I created a domain on a basic hosting platform using Siteground, they are a lot more techno than GoDaddy and I thought that it might me a risk going to them, but for under $20 it was worth a shot. Initially it seemed that this may just be the right host, PHP5 support would allow me to move to Gallery 3 and the control panel is full of cool stuff.
Problems with the database restore should have told me that I was wrong, but the curve-ball of getting an old backup from godaddy threw me and I pretty much worked through the night last night.
When I finally got the site up with the last two weeks of images loaded, the impact of the viewers from around the world simply swamped the poor host and they throttled the scripts.
In short they are a great host, but not tough enough, I will be using the hosting space for this blog and my personal sites once I have got my new host up and running.
So, my new host…..
Following some advice on fatwallet.com I am now the proprietor of an extremely cool Virtual Dedicated Server. I am not going to say where just yet as I want them to prove that they can handle the traffic before I give them a shout out, but I certainly got a ‘deal’.
Initial impressions are very, very very good indeed.
The MYSQL database that took ‘all night’ to create last night on siteground took 4 minutes and 15 seconds here.
Approximately 120 times faster.
FTP is uploaded at a solid 1.4MB vs 240KB on the old host.
But the best part is that we are no longer worried too much about processor and memory use unless we try to exceed the apportioned amounts.
So, the new URL that I am building on is cncpicsarchive.com all other domains point here.
As I intimated with the title of this post, I have learnt a lot during this fiasco. Continue reading “Learning through adversity” »
