Re:Ask HN: My host has me over a barrel. I've placed myself...
by lsc on Tuesday October 07, 2008 @08:16PM
(#326210)
you have 2 options.
1. buy a much more powerful server/VPS.
for seventy some odd dollars a month you can just leave your amazon ec2 image up all the time, and that's something like 1.7Gb ram. if you are willing to use a small provider (like me) you can do even better- I'll give you 2GB ram for $64/month. Having more ram makes a lot of problems just go away. (using a Xen based host also means that you can use swap, which means that your out of memory events would be slowdowns rather than crashes.)
2. get a skilled SysAdmin (possibly you) to optimize your system from a systems standpoint.
ultimately, you want both. But often just buying a better server is the cheapest option.
But yeah. no matter how much you like your host, I recommend that you always have a hot copy of your website/application at another server, ready to switch the dns over at the first sign of trouble. you should test this periodically.
1. buy a much more powerful server/VPS.
for seventy some odd dollars a month you can just leave your amazon ec2 image up all the time, and that's something like 1.7Gb ram. if you are willing to use a small provider (like me) you can do even better- I'll give you 2GB ram for $64/month. Having more ram makes a lot of problems just go away. (using a Xen based host also means that you can use swap, which means that your out of memory events would be slowdowns rather than crashes.)
2. get a skilled SysAdmin (possibly you) to optimize your system from a systems standpoint.
ultimately, you want both. But often just buying a better server is the cheapest option.
But yeah. no matter how much you like your host, I recommend that you always have a hot copy of your website/application at another server, ready to switch the dns over at the first sign of trouble. you should test this periodically.