"Victim of my own success"

That's a phrase you see used quite a lot and this last couple of weeks I've come to have a new appreciation for what it means. I've been running my CarBibles website for ages and in 2004 I moved it to a new server. Since then its been getting increasingly popular and in the last couple of weeks things have reached breaking point. On the shared server I was on at lunarpages (my host), I was consuming 6% of the server memory and CPU time. It doesn't sound like much but on their cheapest shared hosting plans, each server holds 350 customer sites. ie. you're supposed to use about 0.2% of server capacity. I was using 30 times that much. After a lot of back and forth with their technical guys we determined that I had too much traffic for even one of their VPS servers - nearly private servers where you share with 9 other customers. In the end I had to go with a full dedicated server. ie. in a rack somewhere in California, there's now a server in a farm that is doing nothing but hosting my site.
I also now have a whole new appreciation for how expensive dedicated hosting can be even though they discounted my rate by nearly $500/year for being a long-term customer. The good news though is that being on a dedicated server, the site now has huge bandwidth and full processor and memory availability. Go take a look - Car maintenance bibles.

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