Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

Approximately 2 years ago, Blogger was hosting this blog. They had many problems with their servers, and I got quite frustrated by the downtimes. So I thought, “Ok, I might as well host the whole thing myself! At least I can do better than them!”

I was so wrong! Managing your own hosting is a different game altogether - you would have to make sure that the server is running, and that it isn’t overloaded because your neighbours (I’m sharing the servers with a few other people) decided to host pornography on the same server as you. Plus, you would have to manage your own blog publishing software, which in my case is Wordpress. You have to make sure that you update the software each time there’s an upgrade, complain to the web host when things don’t go right, and stay on your toes for hackers. Thank goodness for the fact that my web host is managing all the security patches for the operating system, the firewalls, router configuration, etc, or else I might unwittingly turn into an unpaid web server administrator!

Well, managing a server is not that bad, but given the choice of having more free time versus spending time managing the back-end stuff for a blog that doesn’t make any money, I’ll choose the former; but being the darn cheapskate, stereo-typical DIY-to-death person that I am, forking out money to have someone manage my web hosting is way out of my options. In fact, I spent an entire day wrestling with a non-working graphics card on my PC to diagnose a problem, rather than call in the technician, even though my PC was still under warranty. The good news is that Stubbornness has so far allowed me to learn a lot more about electronic gadgets than I would have if I bought a new one each time something broke, and it would probably be very useful when I struggle with program codes that refuse to work correctly.

Even so, there are still some things I am powerless to fix.

Here’s a snap-shot of the server statistics during normal hours. You can see that there is a decent amount of CPU time lying around, doing absolutely nothing - which is good. Servers are supposed to sit around and do nothing until a visitor requests for a web page.

Now take a look at this snap-shot taken when the whole world is trying to reach the server. The load average shows a 7, which is quite bad. A normal web server should have a load average of around 2 or 3.

For a start, this server is shared with other domains, some of which I know are porn websites. It kind of turns you off when you think about it. The high load was probably not generated by SgBlogging sites, since I’ve checked the statistics: we only account for about 2% of the total server load in a day.

Ah, then what about the remaining 98% of the server load? Who took them? I have no idea. In fact, I don’t know how many people are sharing this server, but I feel a bit exploited, kind of like you share in the money equally to buy a cake, only to get… 1/50 part of the cake? I wouldn’t have really cared for this, if not for the fact that it has come to a point that the sites on the SgBlogging domain have started to crawl really badly. 37 seconds to get to a page is too long!

I’ve already sulked to DreamHost about this situation, but there’s been no reply so far. I’ll see how it goes. Virtual Private Servers at some other web hosts look quite inviting.

Filed under: General