I’ve been getting word from a few people recently that my website is responding unusually slowly as of late. I generally don’t notice this much myself (as when I’m at home everything goes over the local network), but I have been noticing that the traffic indicator light on my DSL modem has been very active lately.
There’s a few things that could account for that amount of activity and the speed issues, but my guess is that it’s simply that while my DSL line and aging webserver were fine for my needs a while ago, I’m outgrowing them.
Right now, I’ve got a 1.5 Mb/sec incoming, 768 kbps/sec outgoing DSL line, and an old 350Mhz G3 as webserver. I’ve set my server up to host two domains for myself (djwudi.com, which is currently essentially unused, and michaelhanscom.com), one for my dad (hanscomfamily.com), two for friends (Kirsten at geekmuffin.com and Phil at interalia.org), and I found out a while ago that Phil has set someone else up on my server as well (patreesha.com).
A few months ago, none of those site were getting enough traffic for that to be a major issue. As the sites grow, though, and as Google finds more and more pages to send people to, I’ve simply run out of server horsepower and bandwidth.
So, I think it’s time for me to pare things down a little bit and look into external hosting options. Mike‘s given his hosting provider, LivingDot, a good recommendation, and their packages look better than both Laughing Squid (BoingBoing‘s host) and Logjamming (Wil Wheaton‘s host), but I’m open to suggestions if anyone else might have any.
This won’t be an “overnight” thing, so there’s no danger of me suddenly pulling the plug on any of the sites I host. I already knew that I’d have to be disconnecting my server for an as yet unspecified amount of time when I move in with Prairie in a few months, so the end of August is something of a “drop dead” date for me to get all of this taken care of. My sites may move over before then, depending on affordability and how much of a PROJECT the transition becomes, but I’m not about to just drop my friends’ sites into the great bit bucket in the sky. :)
It’s a bit of a bummer, as I’ve enjoyed having the ability to host things on my own, without having to worry about storage space (I’ve got around 100Gb of drive space on my server) or bandwidth caps (as long as I pay my bills, Speakeasy doesn’t care how much data I pump in or out over my DSL line, or limit what I can or cannot do with my server)…but after a while, even I have to succumb to the reality of the situation.
“Under the Milky Way” by Church, The from the album Never Mind the Mainstream (1988, 5:00).