Well I’ve finally found out why the site went down and the simple answer is … Digg.com. The site became popular and has (so far) got almost six hundred Diggs. This in itself increased traffic massively to the site, but if I’m being honest shouldn’t have caused the site to be taken down - it was well under the 2000GB a month limit (the most it’s ever got in a day was 1.6GB). The problem was (I think) some of the less efficient code I was using (namely the code providing the comments). As mentioned in a previous post, I’ve removed these scripts and it all seems tickety boo.
In my opionion, some of the comments on Digg were a little unfair towards my hosts. Of course, it’s incredibly frustrating when a site is taken down by a host, but it really isn’t the end of the world. This is not a commercial website, and I’m not going to fork out hundreds of dollars a month to put it on a dedicated server - that really would be overkill. Some might challenge the fact that it isn’t commercial because of the adverts - I’ve added these in an attempt to cover the cost of hosting (and maybe get myself a couple of CDs when the cheque comes through), but really the income generated by the site is peanuts. I’ve gone with my host’s economy package which is less than $3 a month, but provides much more bandwidth and storage than this site requires (now and for the foreseeable future). However, for $3 you don’t expect them to be too pleased when someone is using a lot more than their fair share of the server load. At the moment I am reasonably happy with the hosting, but if I get some more Diggs I might be forced to reconsider. In the meantime I have made some changes to lighten the mapofstrange.com load on the webhostingbuzz servers, which were highlighted in my previous post.
As regular visotors may be aware, the website was down for a few days at the end of August and start of September. We are really sorry for any inconvenience this caused. The downtime was caused by increased traffic over a 48 hour period. Basically, the number of visitors suddenly doubled in the space of a couple of days and we were taking up too much of the CPU on our host’s servers.
To combat this issue we’ve had to make some changes to the site to make things a little bit more efficient. The following changes have been made:
- We’ve had to disable the comments for the time being. Our stats showed that the comments scripts were being called an average of eight times more than the homepage, and although this might be a sign of their popularity we’ve had to make the difficult decision to remove them for the sake of the website as a whole. Don’t worry if you’ve previously added a comment - these are safe, and we are currently working on a more efficient method of displaying them.
- To put more emphasis on the client side (you) rather than the server side (us), we’ve also made the map show 30 rather than 25 markers. This will mean that the page will take a little longer to load, but won’t put quite as much pressure on the server (hopefully). To be honest, this is a guess, and it might work in the opposite way - we’ll just have to keep our eyes on the stats - so if it’s down to 10 markers at the end of this week, you’ll know why! *** Amendment *** - We’ve made it 20 markers on a page. That’s because we have a large number of visitors who load up the map once and then don’t bother going any further. By making this reduction, these people mean that we’re actually putting less traffic through the server
- The Google Homepage tool was viewed more than a million times during August (seriously). This in itself has created more than a gigabyte’s worth of traffic on the server. Due to this popularity we couldn’t possibly remove this feature, so we’ve scaled it down instead - it now shows the latest 10 markers rather than the latest 20. That means that the script which generates the markers is only half the size that it would be normally, meaning that we can have more page views for less bandwidth.
- The news section doesn’t list as many items on the front page - it now shows three as opposed to five, meaning that the page isn’t quite as big.
So lets keep our fingers crossed that this fixes the site and we don’t suddenly get taken down again. If anyone can provide a (very) cheap dedicated server, we’d be delighted to hear from you.
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