I’ve been self-hosting this blog for a little over two years and it has been at once a crash course into Linux server administration as well as being just plain fun and while I enjoy it self-hosting does have a major impact on how I can use my connection. I’ve seen traffic spikes, though nothing in the order of being Slashdotted or Dugg, but enough of a swarm to kill services and occasionally knock my DSL offline all of which can be very frustrating and irritating when I want to connect to the terminal server or just run some updates via SSH. So after laboring over whether or not to move the site for the last couple of months I decided to plunk down $5.99 and snag elwoodicious.com.
It is odd the sort of emotions I have about migrating the site. Self-hosting offers so much control but without and industrial strength pipe growth is limited and stability pretty sketchy. Yet, it is my home. I built the walls, raised the roof, and laid the floors, so to move to a hosted solution feels like I’m leaving behind something unique and even precious. I feel almost like I am betraying all that work over the years not to mention that it has been a point of pride for myself.
My goal in moving is to provide a more stable home for this site and in turn open up my server for some new and different services for myself and my family. I’m looking deeper into SVN and VPNs to give us a little more flexibility and security when we travel. I’ve gone just about as far as I want to with the current style of hosting and would like to branch out into some different services and administrative tasks.
This site itself will migrate wholesale over to elwoodicious.com and I’ll keep the blog up for a couple of months before replacing it with a redirect. Hopefully, the move will be relatively painless and I’m looking forward to snappier performance.
Fortunately, my site is not popular enough to cause me any problems with self hosting!
I’d be quite loathe to give up self hosting, I love the control and never liked the contraints with hosting companies…
That is exactly what has made this such a tough decision but it boils down to control and flexibility versus stability and performance. At the moment everything is running on a 1GHz box with 512MB of RAM, which is holding its own for the most part, and a DSL line that is 6 mbps over 768 kbps. These days it barely just works with about 500 hits daily, the rest of the attempts get refused because the connection is just saturated–which really cramps my style if I want to do something remotely.
We’ll see, maybe my blog will come running back to elwoods.org.
I’m actually surprised that 500 page views/day (I assume that’s what you mean by hits) saturates a 768kbps connection. I mean, that’s half of a T1 basically. And these are just web pages, not video files. Unless something else is eating up your bandwidth and the refused connections are just a symptom of that…
You mentioned you listen to your mp3s remotely at work so that’s going to be a constant hit during 9-5 to your bandwidth…just another example…
By my calculations, 500 pages @ 40k per page (the size of this page) is a paltry 20MB. ???
Have you got gzip compression enabled on your webserver?
If not, try reading this:
http://www.webreference.com/internet/software/servers/http/compression/
You may not have to move off after all: most web browsers nowadays have gzip compression capabilities built in.
sell the excess comm equipment on craigslist to fund the transition.
68uberfinancier
@Mike - Yeah, the streaming eats up a pile of bandwidth as do the file transfers to and from work all of which adds up to an average of 500 MB a day. I’m pounding the crap out of the connection which mostly is felt by me but is occasionally felt by people visiting the site. Hell, just approving Kirrus’ comment resulted in a page load time of 38 seconds. Damn. don’t even get me started on how poorly Jinzora has been performing lately under these conditions.
@Kirrus - I did play a little with it during the first server evolution, as Mike can attest, I have a bad habit of building and destroying these boxes! I will look back into it though as it might just help with whatever future projects I tackle on this box.
Ha! Not a chance, 68! Outsourcing the blog hosting is just the natural evolution of leveraging untapped synergy present in pre-exsiting asset matrices. (ok, who won bullshit bingo this round?)