Increasingly popular site in a shared environment

No point being popular if you cannot access the site!

[stuartmcdonald]

For years how I've used a small hosting company that I have a reseller plan with and I use them to host around 20 sites. They're all very small, low traffic sites and there has never been a problem.

One of the sites however (my baby) is becoming increasingly popular at an increasing rate. It is a MySQL driven site and we're staring to get a lot of "too many connections" problems. I've talked to the host - and they're saying that its no a problem with my site, but rather because its a shared envionment they have to keep the connections limited etc. The problem is, we've got some good press coming up over the next couple of months - including a feature story on the site in Time magazine (I'm not kidding - very happy about that one!) but it's all going to be a waste of time if nobody can access the site due to the above prob.

I know the corect response is to move to site out of shared hosting, but I'd like to put that off for as long as possible due to the costs - so what I'm asking I guess is can you have a increasngly popular site in shared hosting and still be able to access it or should I just bite the bullet?

Thanks

[Marcia]

Ok to leave the small sleepers where they are but for a site that's starting to be a mover, bite the bullet and get ample hosting with a unique IP. Definitely a unique IP. If it's not paying for itself, there must be some way to monetize it. Scroll down to the bottom of the page here and take a look - obviously there are companies that can handle heavy traffic without a problem.

[stuartmcdonald]

Thanks for the quick reply. The site already has its own IP. Thanks for the tip anyways.

[Marcia]

There shouldn't be that type of limitations. I guess popularity has its pitfalls. :)

[peterdaly]

I went from a web server hosted on my residential cable modem directly to a $95US/month dedicated server.

If you are outgrowing shared hosting, in most cases I would expect/hope that the site either already makes enough $$$ to pay for the server, or has the potential to.

If it can pay for itself, take the leap the leap and don't look back. If it can't, take the leap anyway, but then focus on how to make the site at least break even, and make sure you have a reasonable contract term if you need to back out.

Or justify it by moving all 20 sites. That's less than $5/month per site for a $95/month server. Can you get $$$ to average $5/month across your sites? That's only 16 cents a day per site! (that's if I can do math) You could make that much with a single adsense click per site (for some topics), or a handful of Google WebSearch queries. Don't forget affilate programs either. Add a paypal donation link if it's the right type of site. Clients sites? As low as $5/month should be a no-brainer sale. There are lots of ways to cover the costs, especially if you have a (well programmed) site that demands more resources. Now if you have poorly written scripts that use more than one db connection at once per page...that's another matter entirely.

When I signed up for my $95/month dedicated server, the amount seemed huge and rather scary. That was about a year and a half ago. Now I can sometimes have it pay for itself on the first day of the month. That $95/month no longer seems that scary.

[vkaryl]

No way to "bump" your plan up a notch or two for a couple of months, at a somewhat increased rate? If not, that's a bit odd....

You might need to TALK to your hosting company a bit further (NOT email, etc! - it's all too easy to blow someone off by email and so on....) They REALLY need to accomodate you in this instance, considering the business you state you have with them....

[stuartmcdonald]

Am discussing further with them (the hosts) at the moment (by email as I'm in Cambodia and they're in Kansas!), but as you rightly point out, getting info out of them is like getting blood from a stone...

Thanks for the quick and very helpful responses all - its an excellent forum this one.

[vkaryl]

Oh lord.... "we're not in Kansas any more"!

Sticky on its way to you with a potential solution.