To VPS or not to VPS

Internet | Winston | November 24, 2007 12:55 am

My PRC Board Exam Results website has been experiencing a lot of server problems since Jehz and I launched it. Most of these problems are related to bandwidth and CPU usage.

Since October, our site has migrated from three different servers. First, I was the one who hosted it on my Gold Account at Marvins Web. Later on, we managed to transfer it on Jehz’s server. But before the month ended, the site already consumed the account’s allocated bandwidth. This incident pushed us to look for a bigger server. That was the time when Kuya Blogie offered his DavaoBlogs.com hosting account to host the PRC Board Exam Results website.

The site receives thousands of unique visitors with hundreds of thousands of page views for its first month. As of the moment, we already have more than 2000 RSS and E-mail subscribers. This big audience and big traffic brought our site to another bad situation. Unfortunately, Lunar Pages does not only look at the site’s bandwidth consumption. It also tries to consider the CPU usage and RAM usage for that matter.

Last night, Kuya Blogie received an e-mail from his provider telling him how our site consumes most of the CPU and RAM of the server. This was the reason why the administrators immediately suspended our account. They even suggested that we should go for a VPS or Virtual Private Server account. Going for a VPS account would mean another cost for us and for Kuya Blogie. VPS account for Lunar Pages usually cost around 2000 pesos per month.

The anticipation for the Civil Engineering Licensure Examination for November 2007 brought down the site because of the high traffic which our server cannot accomodate. The question of having a vps or not is still hanging. We cached the whole site though to reduce the server’s load, but still this is not an assurance if that same problem would occur again.