Site Update
Our server crashed earlier today. Everything was backed up so we didn’t loose more than a few reader comments (sorry).
Hiddenfeets website traffic seems to be a bit much for shared hosting. We have yet to even post pictures and videos from our models yet – which would increase our web traffic ten fold. Tough to imagine what would happen then. And yes, we already host our images on flickr to save bandwidth.
We are researching dedicated servers from ThePlanet, Fdcservers, and Rackspace. Our hobby of helping others is getting very expensive. $129-$200 a month is a lot of money and we don’t want to run annoying ads on our website.
All the girls that run Hiddenfeet are somewhat depressed right now. We are meeting later this week to brainstorm ideas.
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Oh poor dear. Thats no fun! I thought something was wrong when I visited earlier today.
Hang in there Sara. Fight and stay strong. You will find a way. You are a Virgo right? Virgo is the only zodiacal sign represented by a female. Coincidence that you helps girls on such a feminine topic?
What’s your monthly bandwidth use? Those are big providers for huge huge solutions, you could probably tailor something that fits hiddenfeet needs.
If you’re going to be storing media you can consider using Amazon’s s3 service which I’ve heard is very cheap.
Is the site other than Wordpress+plugins at the moment?
@JJ Just wordpress right now. You mention Amazons S3 and thats what we are using for remote storage of all the videos and pictures that girls send us (along with many terrabytes of harddrives at my house) and future media that we will produce ourselves.
Its not so much the bandwidth or storage as the server cpu usage being on shared hosting. We took this screen shot a few hours before everything crashed – http://i31.tinypic.com/ev3sat.jpg
Our site gets around 1,500 visitors a day with peak days around 2k. Now if there are a hundred other websites on the same server – well…you probably know this but all those people running blogs making php requests etc are going to strain the box.
Us girls have big plans for model shoots, video DVD production, contests and polls. And its not hard to imagine exceeding 10k visitors a day. While I know that might not seem like a lot, most shared hosting solutions are telling us that it is.
We do have an idea that Megan talked about on the phone with me this morning. Maybe you (and anyone else reading this) could share your thoughts Jj.
We are close to having enough money to film some new documentaries (were not happy with the quality of 2 earlier ones – long story) and can publish factory pressed DVDs to sell through Kickstarter.com (anyone know of other similar sites?). The idea is that if hosting costs $150 a month and we prepay for a year thats almost 2k that we would need to have donated. At $20 a DVD we would need only a 100 people to pre-sell to. And then every 6 months to a year the cycle would continue.
Might work?
I am sorry about your troubles, but just wanted to say thank you for all the work you all do. This is one of the best websites, and helps dealing with the sometimes difficult life with larger than average breasts. I love all of your articles and tips, they help me feel more confident daily and see that there is a community of support :) Thank you sincerely from a loyal teenage hiddenfeet reader <3
lol – cute <3 boobie symbol. I have never seen that before!
Thanks for the support!
Hey Sara,
You could probably tune your WP installation, do you know what is the average and the high number of visitors at any given moment? because those are the moments when the servegr will be more stressed.
Do you have cache plugins installed in Wordpress? They should help with several concurrent requests since the site doesn’t change too often and is the same for all visitors. That should hugely decrease the database load.
It would also be a good idea to check the plug ins installed and see if any of them is making the server work unnecesarily hard, there may be a bug on any of them, or double check if it is really necessary.
It would be a good idea to load test the site to make it “break” again and monitore exactly where is it breaking so you know what is the piece you need to work on instead of just getting everything bigger (more expensive)
Over $2K yearly is a tad too much for a server hosting a blog, even a very visited one. I don’t know what your current server situation is but I’m sure that something can be done without spending that much money on new servers, probably just pay some more for extra RAM (for caching) and if necessary CPU.
The DVD selling idea sounds attractive, but it may not be able to sustain costs for a second or third year. Have you thought of advertising on the site? starting with something like google ads and then sell banner space to bra stores or any related site. You could make some money there. Probably some “top contributors” space or something :)
Hey Jj – thanks again for the feedback.
We do have the super-chache plugin installed and working well. I just don’t think other people on our server are optimizing their code – hence the extreme cpu usage. We agree that $2k a year is a lot but shared hosting (from anyone we know of) isn’t giving us the option to increase ram or cpu.
We might consider google ads but its a last resort for us. I personally hate them when I visit sites and plugins for firefox 3.5 can block most of them these days.
hehe, yeah ads can get annoying if overused. But probably the idea of sponsored banners could work and be less annoying (just one thing, if used dont name them “*ad*” othwewise adblockers will block them).
BTW, I’m using Linode.com as a VPS solution, it gives you total access to a virtual host (shell, root, choose your OS and what not) and guarantees your resources so you get the hardware you pay for. Their prices are not so bad and their customer support is pretty good so you could ask for ram or CPU upgrades if needed.
Jj feel free to post a link to your site when you make comments – I won’t consider it spam. You have always been a big help. Ill get to working with you soon – promise!
Hey Sara,
Congrats on getting the site up and running! I will probably be talking with you on getting mine up and going. Because it sounds like we’re going to be having similar servers, product(such as film,video,photography) etc…
Keep up the GQQD work;=)
Still gotta migrate to a new server in the next few weeks. Just trying to work out deals that don’t break the bank. Thanks for the encouraging words Reggie – your a good friend!
lol – cute <3 boobie symbol. I have never seen that before!
Thanks for the support!