Hostest With the Mostest – Being a good neighbor on shared hosting

(Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes)

One of the things I really love about Website In A Weekend is that I have the coolest, most diverse audience in Blogistan. (prove that I don’t! :) A while back, David Hutchison stopped by with some words of wisdom on hosting. As usual, I instantly roped him in to a guest post. I don’t know David personally, but from email and reading through his hockey goaltending niche blog, I’m impressed: Hockey, rowing coach, physics and computer science teacher. With this article, David is coming to us from inGoal Magazine, his website specializing in hockey goaltending.

Hostest With the Mostest – Being a good neighbor on shared hosting

-by David Hutchison

David kindly invited me to submit a guest article, related to my recent comment on finding a web host. I’ve been enjoying Website in a Weekend and it was my pleasure to submit this. I’m certainly no expert but I hope that my experience is either helpful to you, or the beginning of a conversation on this site that will help others.

I have had an interesting adventure with web hosting as I have grown my site, inGoal Magazine, into a site for hockey goaltenders that receives a reasonable amount of traffic. I began the project, and it remains today, as a hobby. There are several reasons for this that would make an interesting article as well, but that’s for another day. Wanting to incur a minimum in expenses I went with a shared hosting plan, as I suspect most readers will be using. For less than 10 bucks a month you can get a reasonable plan just about anywhere. With shared hosting you are given space on a managed server, along with many others –how many I’m sure depends on your host but I used myIPneighbors.com and found that I am on the same server with 778 others.

It is possible for your site to crash through no fault of your own. One bad neighbor can bring everyone else down. It happened a few times to me – but one day, without realizing it, I was the bad neighbor.

How to be a good neighbour – and maximize your site’s potential on a budget

Eventually, if you aren’t careful, you’ll “outgrow” your shared hosting plan. That’s the message I got from my host one day when our site’s traffic went over 5000 page views and our server crashed. Finally we were getting some decent traffic and we were out of commission. And a quick look around told me that whatever the next step of hosting would be for us, it was going to get expensive. We’re a non-commercial (read: no revenue) site and that just wasn’t an option.

Our host was kind enough to take some time to explain it all to me. We were serving up far too much data – consuming more than our fair share of bandwidth. I was on a hosting plan that had (in theory) unlimited bandwidth. They were willing to fulfill that commitment, but did it only after throttling things so the bandwidth I got was going to come out very slowly. Page load times went through the roof.

The problem was simple.

inGoal Magazine is photo-intensive

People come to see, amongst other things, the latest photos of goalie masks, and professional shots of goalies in action. Back then I was taking the easy route, the route that seemed to provide the most benefit for our readers. I would upload big images, downsize them for posts and use a lightbox plugin so when readers clicked on the shots a much bigger image popped up on the screen.

What does this all mean in reality? One 1024 px wide image at 72 dpi comes in around 250 kb in size. Today I have 31 images in various posts on our homepage. Do a little math and that could be over 7 Mb in photos being served up for a singe pageview! A 5000 page view day would be 35Gb of data.

Clearly I was not being a good neighbour on my site.

So – what is the solution? Today at GoDaddy I would need a $180 per month dedicated server to handle the kind of data I was kicking out. There is no guarantee that it could handle it either – one server can only handle so many simultaneous requests. Cloud hosting sounds like the solution to simultaneous requests, but again it’s not cheap.

There are lots of options to deal with the problem: downsize your images, display fewer on the home page and so on. For us though, it wasn’t the complete answer. I have moved to a maximum of 650px wide, for example, but our readers come for photos and we aren’t willing to compromise a great deal. This situation immediately explained to me why people host images and other media off their site.

My affordable hosting solution

Because we are dealing with photographs – you can’t do this with any other graphics – I host most of my new images on Flickr. For about $25 a year I have a pro account and can host essentially an unlimited number of images. The photographers who contribute to our site do the same. I’m sure places like Photobucket, and Picasa give you similar options, but I haven’t explored them.

This is not for everyone for sure. You can’t upload images that aren’t yours to use (not that you should do this anyway), and you have to link back to the Flickr photo page from the images you insert on your blog. No more fancy lightbox, a curious click on your image needs to head to Flickr. But I’m wiling to do that because I can’t afford the alternative.

The professional solution without these restrictions of course is to go with something like Amazon’s S3 service. As I read it, with Amazon you’re looking at some $0.15 per Gb which for me would be over $200 per month. That was at 5000 page views. My biggest day came recently during the Olympics at 33,000 views.

Thanks to my move to Flickr, a single pageview now requires my host to serve up less than 200Kb. If we assume that trouble came when my server had to deal with about 30 GB of bandwidth then I should be good now up to about 175,000 page views per day. I think it’s safe to say that isn’t about to happen. Problogger serves 30-50 thousand in a day.

Multiple Load Balanced Servers on a Budget

As I noted before, a single dedicated server might not serve my needs. Even if it could handle the data I serve, I have a feeling that at some point it would not handle enough simultaneous requests (one pageview requires many requests). Obviously it’s a different scale, but that’s one reason Google has farms of servers.

Whether it’s the deluxe Amazon solution or my budget conscious Flickr solution though I know that the company serving the bulk of my content is doing it from a large farm of top of the line servers. Even if I went with a new hosting plan and my own dedicated server, I couldn’t do that.

This is just one situation and I expect readers could offer all kinds of suggestions for me and for others in similar situations. I would welcome your comments.

David Hutchison is the editor of inGoal Magazine. Together with a team of writers and photographers who share his commitment and passion for goaltending he is building a leading site for the most important players on any ice hockey team. And he does it at night after the kids go to bed.