Four server hops in 2 months!

Steep!!!

Well thats one word that best describes this past 2 months. From a shared hosting of lunarpages , to a VPS account on Spry, an entry-level Sempron 3100 server from FDCservers and finally to a Core2 Duo server.

I have this site that is rapidly climbing the alexa ranks in these past few months and I struggled hard to build it a new home (I don’t wanna mention it’s url here for some cool reasons ). I never thought that the site would took off that fast and was actually caught “sleeping on my keyboard”.

To start with, I had zero-nada-zilch knowledge on running my own linux box. The shared hosting from lunarpages was actually great! But sadly they have to kick-me-out since my account has been overloading their shared -hosting server single handedly.

I landed on a Virtual Private Server from Spry, Well I must say that the guys at spry are great and they are really experts. The good thing about their support is that they explain to you what went wrong and they fix it quick and nice. Coming from a shared hosting environment was a big leap and I have to keep up with the learning curve or I’ll end up with a dead server, lost traffic and some “moolah”. The spry support has been very helpful and I got the site backup with little downtimes. They setup everything from DNS configuration up to some fine tuning of the web server. And so I got by for a couple of weeks on this VPS with no hassle but then there’s another hump-a-head.

The site kept-climbing the alexa ranks linearly thus the VPS which only has 10mbps connectivity loaded extremely slow. Ticket, tickets and tickets the guys at spry can only do as much since I’m sitting on a cheap (but good) VPS with a Fat-ass website. I decided to get an unmanaged entry level server from fdcservers.net to complement the overwhelmed VPS. FDC offers unmetered- 100Mbps connectivity at a very competitive price. Since FDC’s services are all unmanaged, you have to do all the configurations, troubleshooting and optimization yourself!

It took me 2 days to to configure DNS and resolve domains properly. For a time, I ran these two servers on parallel to accommodate my site. The VPS is used as the main Web server and the dedicated server is used to host the files. It bought me time to study before I switched it entirely to the dedicated server and handle everything on my own.

Three weeks ago, the traffic barely hits the 60K pageviews per day, but it seems people love the site! In a span of 3 days the page views doubled and the Sempron server with only a Gig of ram was barely surviving. During peek times I have to restart /stop apache and mysql before the whole thing comes crashing.

Half into its monthly term, I decided to get another upgrade or watch this poor Sempron server die. I decided to get a better machine again from FDC and this time I decided to get an Intel Core2Duo system with 2Gb of RAM. Several days of headache and clueless fine tuning and tons of optimization (server configs and code cleanup). The site is finally up and kickin’ !

Until the next upgrade…