Working to improve speed of the forum/site - UPDATED 10/26/05 - READ IN

[mouser]

I can see that the server is slowing down quite a bit sometimes, making reading the forum a bit annoying when it does so.
After a week of server software coding, i'm now going to work on optimizing the site speed.
It may be that we have to move to a full dedicated hosting plan to get good speed, which would double our hosting costs every month but whatever we have to do we'll do to make it a nice fast experience, just give us a little bit of time to see what we can do.

[vegas]

Is this the best option out there.  the current hosting company?  I assume you have already shopped around for the best possible solution?

[mouser]

well, the forum is growing and combined with all the downloads, it definitely puts a real strain on the server.
the current company we have PowerVps is extremely reliable, and not super expensive (though not cheap).
reliability and good support is something that i think is important for us.

right now we are on whats called shared virtual hosting - basically it means we have complete control over the software running on the machine, BUT we are sharing a machine with one or more other sites.

it *appears* at first glance that our speed problems are not bandwidth related (even though we do a ton of bandwidth) but are more releated to overwhelming the cpu.

there are some php and database and server optimization we can do to improve performance, and i'm working on those now.

after that we can consider changing hosts and/or moving to a dedicated hosting account.

the shared hosting we pay for now is about $50 a month, which is a big chunk of the monthly donations, and a good dedicated hosting plan would be somewhere like $100 a month, which would be a huge chunk of the donations.

however, if that's what we need to do to get the site really speedy and smooth, then it seems to me that's what we have to do - there's no point having a nice forum if its a pain to use..

[AbteriX]

[???]
maybe you can make an club with members how pay montly
and share your server-disk for little homepages or ftp space.
(no php/sql and big downloads allowed)
[/???]

[mouser]

just an update:
i'm struggling to understand how to install and configure and test these php/sql tweaks and i make break the site for an hour or so if i do something truly horrible - so if the site becomes unreachable, don't panic.

[mouser]

wrt to stefan's point: we have expressed willingness to host members low bandwidth sites, mostly just as a favor to members.

[mouser]

maybe you can make an club with members how pay montly
and share your server-disk for little homepages or ftp space.

very interesting idea..

actually i thought a lot about Stefan's suggestion and we've started a thread discussing this idea, which we are probably going to try(!):
http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=1261.0

[mouser]

I've just gotten confirmation that our new dedicated hosting account has been activated, and I will be mirroring the site on the new computer in the next couple of days.

This is so exciting - a dedicated server is a big deal! 

Hopefully soon the site will be smooth like butter 

I'll post more details as I make progress in moving the site to the new computer.

Thanks to everyone who has donated to the site so far - your donations have made this possible.   

though I note that this new dedicated server is a huge financial leap and in order to keep it we need to have a good month of fundraising in november and get enough people who want to join in the webhosting project.