Do I need a managed server?

[Scooter24]

I have a photo gallery site with 12000 photos. The site is structured hierarchically in galleries, according to to location. The pages are dynamic (PHP), but do not use MySQL. They rely instead on many local textfile databases.

Everything has been fine for years, but suddenly the host is complaining that my site generates too much load on the server. Which is a bit strange, because traffic has been stagnating since last year and in fact dropped by about 20% since 2007.

Currently there are around 20000 page requests per day, i.e. one every 4.3 seconds. The traffic peaks at around 1100 pages per hour and at the lowest point it's around 700 pages per hour.

Each page request generates a number of file requests. If it's a gallery page the html of the page is generated and all thumbnails are served. If it's an image page, only the html of the page and the image are served.

Anyway, I have difficulties believing that a page request every 4.3 seconds can generate a significant load on a server. But what do you think? Do I need a managed server?

[The Contractor]

You probably should first start with a good hosting company if you are not already using one. If you are on one of those cheapie "get nearly unlimited everything for practically nothing" hosts...that's probably the problem.

[frenzy77]

Hey scooter:)

Well, from speaking to some web hosts, they say if a site starts to affect the servers and the rest of the other sites on the server, they will tell you that your basicly need to upgrade or move to another server.

As far as what is happening, and this is just a guess, you possibly may have bots running around your site consuming bandwidth and maybe that is causing the extra bandwidth usage. Not sure, just a guess:)

So, stop those badrobots. Maybe that will help:)

frenzy