Due to popularity of Iceland geology my current dedicated server is getting fully used. That has resulted in slower website access when the most traffic is coming to Iceland geology during the day. Since I’m broke I can’t afford a server upgrade until September at the earliest. This means I’m going to be running a 1,6Ghz server with 4GB ram until that time.
The new server I plan on upgrading to is going to have a 3,6Ghz CPU and 16GB ram to start with and 1TB hard drive. That is going to cost me $219 (~183€) a month.
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Article updated on 06-August-2017 at 20:04 UTC.
That price in insane. Please consider something reasonable, AWS for example.
Compared to AWS this hosting is cheap. AWS price model are insane.
See here, https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/dedicated-hosts/pricing/
The whole pricing, https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
I did look at the AWS price long time ago. I found it not something I like and that if I moved to AWS it would cost me a lot more.
Thanks for your suggestion.
Have you tried to find a software solution for this problem? I don’t really have the impression that your blog is so extremely popular that you need a 200$/month server to handle the load. I have gotten a huge performance improvement by installing the “W3 Total Cache” plugin for wordpress.
The cache plug-ins are security risk. I also don’t want to use cloudflare since it is basic the same, just on DNS scale.
I don’t get many comments (most of the time). But the traffic is stable at ~2000 page views a day if nothing is going on. Just the events around Katla volcano that did go up to 16.000 page views a day when it topped few days ago.
This is also about CPU and memory. Current server only has 1,6Ghz server with CPU type that is not known of high performance. It also has small memory, that is only 4GB and that is not enough for anything today.
Software changes and that requires new and more powerful hardware. That is what has just happened here on top of more traffic to my website.
Thanks for your suggestion.
Well the W3 total cache plugin can still serve the pages from your server (by caching complete pages on disk or in memory). CDN integration is optional but even without that it will probably solve the CPU load problem. An amount of 16k page views per day should be very well possible with low end hardware as soon as WordPress doesn’t have to render the page again and again (based on the database) for every visitor.
Hi Jon,
You can get dedicated server hardware from €45 a month with strato in Germany, that would include a quad-core (3,5 GHz) machine running 2x 4Tb HDDs and 32 GB memory with full root control. They also have windows servers if preferred.
https://www.strato.de/server/linux-root-server/
There are other hosters offering similar deals with dedicated hardware at similar prices. You might need to shop around a little, but you can definately save a few dollars with the right provider and keep your data in the EU.
Looking at the servers in use I think this is not as good as I can get where I’m currently hosting in the U.S.
Thank you for suggestion.
Dear Jón,
First of all, sorry for my english.
In the past 6 years I had three blogs on the WordPress plataform. Two of them had +/- 15.000 visits a day for a long period and the other one +/- 20.000. The sites were fast, with lot of content (text, videos and images), nice design, following the best code practices. In total, for each site, my monthly cost was around 10€. 10€…not 183€. I had my stuff on Bluehost, Hostgator…but the best, in my opinion, was FastComet. Now, you’ll find a great solution there around 13€/mo. No doubt about that.
I’m a regular visitor of this blog, and you should consider a different approach. You’re using WordPress. And if your costs are the ones that you mention…you’re being robbed, for ages.
Regards from Lisbon, Portugal
Guga
I think this is shared hosting that you where using. I am surprised that your website got to stay up with this amount of traffic on that platform.
Shared hosting is now way to small for my website (not just this one).
I thank your suggestion.
Even shared hosting. Or a vps should be able to handle WordPress it’s not an intensive application.
I don’t understand why your hosting needs to be so intensive Jon?
I run a small Windows based, 1.6G dual core with only 2Gb of ram, server at home for my weather website ( http://www.westonweather.co.uk ), which will display 10,000 pages a day without issue.
It also has a webcam, which takes a snapshot every minute, then on the hour stitches the snapshots into a timelapse video.
It’s also an email server handling 6 different domains.
It also hosts a WordPress site as well as a forum on 2 other domains.
p.s. Like others, only trying to help. You always have financial issues, so not spending hundreds of Euros a month on hosting will help!
There is a difference. I checked the counter on your website and for today it shows that you got 50 hits today (page views?). I get a lot more then that during the day.
Normal traffic is around 2000 page views during the day (it goes up and down a bit). When Katla volcano or something else happens that goes up to 6.000 to 10.000 a day. The top during 28th and 29th July was 16.000 page views for 24 hours. I only count person once every 6 hours. The largest spike I’ve had was in 2014 when 95.000 page views happened in one day during the early days of Bárðarbunga volcano eruption.
Then I got webicorder website that has it own number or hits and more. Total number of page views yesterday was around 7100 for all my web pages. Many websites that I have don’t have any traffic or little at best.
I started in shared hosting and I used it until the hosting company started to block my website due too high load from my websites due to traffic I was getting. I am also over VPS solutions since the traffic is too much for such service. Dedicated server is the only thing I use and home hosting is not an option for me.
The reason I have financial issues is not to be found in hosting costs. It has roots in other things (tax things between Iceland and Denmark). If I don’t have proper hosting I am going to loose traffic and that means loosing the little income I get from this website. Anything extra in income does help me.
I am resolving the financial issues. It is a slow progress but it has nothing to do with this hosting issue. All that happens once I change host is a slight increase from what I am currently paying for dedicated hosting.
I had to move to this dedicated host in end of December 2014 and start of January 2015 due to traffic to this website. The hosting company had started sending me traffic warnings due to heavy usage of my then hosting plan. In 2014 I was using VPS hosting plan the biggest one I was able to buy.
I still got this warning in the end due to traffic on Iceland geology.
“During a recent audit of your server we discovered that your account [jonfr] has violated our Resource Abuse Policy by consuming too many server resources. [Technical data below this]”
I was just lucky this didn’t happen when the website was peaking at 60.000 – 95.000 page views a day during the early days of Bárðarbunga volcano.
No, the hits registered at the bottom is unique daily IP visits since midnight. The page views are counted in the banner at the top.
I’m not suggesting you don’t get a lot of traffic, I’m simply suggesting, like others, that you don’t need to spend thousands of Euros a year.
I’m currently running 100.000 pageviews per day on 2 AWS t2.small’s (load balanced, elastic beanstalk).
You should easily be able to host WordPress on an EC2 t2.small. With reserved pricing that’s just $13.21 a month excluding traffic.
Amazon has a year of free tier on t2.micro instances. For both EC2 and RDS. Even that should be sufficient. Just try it. I would highly recommend EC2 (or elastic beanstalk) for WordPress and RDS for MySQL (both one year free).
The others here are correct, you can solve this using other means that do not hit your wallet.
Using caching based on php and wordpress is indeed a bad solution. I would instead suggest using Varnish – which is a simple reverse cache in front of wordpress. It is extremely capable compared to wordpress based caches. It might take a bit of tuning to get it right, but it WILL save you money on hosting solutions. And it can also increase security for a wordpress instance.
Take a look at https://varnish-cache.org/ – and note the first few sentences here:
https://www.varnish-cache.org/docs/5.1/
It’s open sourced, free, and readily available, and does not take a lot to configure. Send me a mail, I’ll be glad to assist you – that’s the least I can do as a reader of your blog.