Ask HN: How do I know if its time to change the host?

Posted by medianama on Wednesday December 24, 2008 @03:27AM
from the ask-hn dept.

I've been running a service on shared host for a few months. The service is getting popular and have started to consume significant proportion of assigned resources (disk space, bandwidth, etc)

Lately, I see my website going down more often than earlier - tends to happen around the time I have more users online or right after a good promotion activity.

How do I know if its time to change the host? Is there anything I could do to find out the number of simultaneous users I can serve on the existing system?

------------------- This is the response from my host:

we have checked and found that at a time 200-300 mysql queries are running through your site so thats why you are getting this issue so i suggest you please take VPS server from us because some time your site taking more CPU and memory usage of the server....

( 4 comments | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: How do I know if its time to change the host? by tower10 on Wednesday December 24, 2008 @04:58AM (#408675)

If your site's going down, it's probably already time. VPS's are pretty cheap. Alternatively, there may be some optimisations you can make to your code to reduce your concurrent MySQL connections.

You can use tools like siege or Apache ab to probe the limits of your capacity, although I wouldn't run them against your shared host out of respect for the others on the machine. You know what your capcacity is there anyway - you've already reached it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How do I know if its time to change the host? by medianama on Wednesday December 24, 2008 @05:15AM (#408679)

My host is asking for $100/month for VPS compared to < $5/month I pay for shared hosting.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How do I know if its time to change the host? by tower10 on Wednesday December 24, 2008 @05:28AM (#408685)

Go to a different host. Here are my two recommendations:

http://linode.com http://slicehost.com

Both start at $20 a month. I am a customer of both.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How do I know if its time to change the host? by medianama on Wednesday December 24, 2008 @05:31AM (#408689)

thanks.

[ Parent | on HN ]