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Sparklette Needs Your Help!

Update: Many generous offers came in moments after this post went up. Thanks to some truly wonderful people, I think we’ll be fine after all!

Sparklette sees 5,000 unique visitors daily or 150,000 visitors monthly, and is a member of the 9rules premium blog network. It is a Google PR5 website and has been around since 2003.

I don’t normally ask for help over here. But this time it is urgent. I am looking for someone who is willing to host this website, Sparklette.net, for free in exchange for permanent advertising for his/her company.

Since March 2009, Sparklette has been hosted on a dedicated server with Site5. It’s a barter trade; they provide me with hosting, I provide them with advertising. ~~That’s the big banner you see on the right and the link in the footer.~~

As the number of visitors to this website grew, the load on the server increased and at times, the website went down. To their credit, Site5 has always provided wonderful tech support during the downtime. But their server can’t support my high-traffic site anymore. The Site5 CEO contacted me about 12 days ago and asked me to upgrade to an expensive server which I can’t afford. He gave me 10 days to think about it.

In those 10 days, I made various adjustments to my site. To the tech-inclined, this includes reducing the number of database queries per page by more than half. I even signed up for a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Stephen from MaxCDN, very graciously offered his company’s CDN service for free in exchange for a tiny footer link.

These efforts paid off, because in those 10 days, the site didn’t go down once and load time improved tremendously. After 10 days, Site5 agreed that there is no need to upgrade my server. I was relieved.

Then came yesterday, the time of the week when everyone gets back to work and site traffic is the highest. My site went down twice for about 5 minutes each time. I monitor this using BinaryCanary. Not missing a beat, Site5 contacted me again and told me to pay a setup fee and upgrade to a USD135/month server or find a new host within 10 days. Just in time for Christmas!

At this present moment, there is no way I can afford to pay that amount to put this site on a dedicated server. Unfortunately that may mean that this site goes Poof! in 10 days. That is why I am asking here:

If you or you know of anyone who may be interested to host this website along with a few small project sites on a dedicated server, I would appreciate it very much if you would please contact me. In exchange I can offer permanent advertising for the hosting company.

Thank you for reading this. Sparklette needs all the help we can get. Please pass this on to anyone whom you think may be able to help.

Tags: web hosting

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About the Editor

Veron Ang is the Founder and Chief Editor of Sparklette, a Singapore restaurants guide, lifestyle and travel blog. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in computer science from the National University of Singapore and runs a web design firm at Sparklette Studio. To get in touch, head on over to the contact page or follow @Sparklette and @VeronSG on Twitter.

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Responses Leave a comment

Sparklette
195 tweets

Help! My site is going down in 10 days unless some kind soul can offer dedicated server hosting. Please help: http://sparklette.net/news/sparklette-ne...
Reply
Tweeted December 8, 2009 at 7:43 am
chuyeow
1 tweet

@sparklette Hey, how much support do you need with hosting? Are you looking for a control panel type host or comfortable with Linux?
Reply
Tweeted December 8, 2009 at 7:54 am
GrowlyBear
5 tweets

@sparklette have you checked out http://www.squarespace.com/
Reply
Tweeted December 8, 2009 at 7:59 am
- Sparklette
  195 tweets
  
  @GrowlyBear Thanks, checking it out now. I can’t tell if it’s shared hosting or dedicated hosting though.
  Reply
  Tweeted December 8, 2009 at 8:05 am
  - GrowlyBear
    5 tweets
    
    @sparklette they have excellent coverage by spreading requests across their servers, plus you can trial run them with no feature turned off
    Reply
    Tweeted December 8, 2009 at 8:09 am
saadkamal
2 tweets

@sparklette I run 2 dedicated box myself with almost no downtime. (I use Pingdom.com for tracking). Whats ur last month’s bandwidth use?
Reply
Tweeted December 8, 2009 at 8:36 am
- Sparklette
  195 tweets
  
  @saadkamal I got 184GB last month (plenty of downtime too). I just signed up with a CDN this month so hopefully that reduces the bandwidth.
  Reply
  Tweeted December 8, 2009 at 8:39 am
  - saadkamal
    2 tweets
    
    @sparklette thats pretty reasonable. How much disk space are you currently using?
    Reply
    Tweeted December 8, 2009 at 8:48 am
Design Ideas
1 comment

Nice post. Thanks!
Reply
Posted December 8, 2009 at 6:35 pm
KahWee
1 comment

Hi there. I don’t think you need an upgrade. Consider tweaking your parameters for your related posts plugin. Choose the options that seems less resource intensive. If your related posts plugin does not do caching, consider getting one that does. I’m running several blogs with rather modest VPS resources (256 MB RAM) since I’m a miser; I also have less combined unique visitors than you (around half of yours). Hope it helps.
Reply
Posted December 8, 2009 at 7:26 pm
- Veron
  3439 comments
  
  Thanks for your advice. Yes, the related posts plugin alone takes up many database queries. I followed this discussion where people were discussing about the best WordPress plugin to use for displaying related posts. Someone mentioned that Similar Posts is the most efficient one in terms of system resources. I’m gonna give that one a go!
  Reply
  Posted December 8, 2009 at 10:36 pm
  - Nicholas
    51 comments
    
    i just installed this a couple of days ago: http://www.linkwithin.com and pretty darn sure it takes up less resource than YARP. p/s my current host suspended me once cos of the related post plugin. all without warning.
    Reply
    Posted December 9, 2009 at 2:26 am
    - Veron
      3439 comments
      
      I noticed many food bloggers using LinkWithin, too. It looks really nice and nifty. I’m not sure how it works though. Do they index all the posts on their own server? If so, then that would definitely take up less resources.
      I heard that YARPP is a monster eater of bandwidth and have always refrained from using that. The WordPress Related Posts plugin has been working pretty well for me. It doesn’t take up that much resources.
      As for the aforementioned Similar Posts, I just gave it a go and found that it is serving more SQL queries than Related Posts. So as of now I am still sticking to the latter.
      Reply
      Posted December 9, 2009 at 2:35 am
      - Nicholas
        51 comments
        
        Not sure where LinkWithin host the index. I was hoping you could tell me. :). I do think the plugin will be good for sites with inage files on posts i.e. like yours.
        I went to that WPP link you posted but got out of there in under 3 seconds. I failed my China… :(
        Reply
        Posted December 9, 2009 at 3:20 pm
pkchukiss
82 comments

For WordPress blogs, you need to get a good cache plug-in, and make sure that the other plug-ins don’t interfere with the cache plug-in. Otherwise, it is very rarely possible for this load to cause a problem with a dedicated server.
Rather than upgrade to a more powerful solution, it might be better to further optimise this like what Kah Wee has mentioned.
Reply
Posted December 8, 2009 at 9:12 pm
- Veron
  3439 comments
  
  Yes, caching certainly helps a lot. All my content as well as database queries are already being cached, and I think I have pretty much exhausted all my options when it comes to caching. You may be on to something about other plugins interfering with the cache plugins. As far as I can see, the caching is being carried out and the files are being generated. As to why there still continues to be downtime, I really have no clue.
  Reply
  Posted December 8, 2009 at 10:44 pm
DT
9 comments

Veron, honestly the number of visitors you get does not really warren dedicated server. I’ll be more suspicious of the quality of your host.
You should consider cheaper alternatives like media temple or even rackspace, if shared servers are not to your liking.
But you should look at how your site is optimized as if there is an issue of coding and database, no host can help you. Also wordpress on its own runs super smooth, it is the images, plugins and java scripts that kills the speed.
PS: Looks like you are on MT, I’m there as well, let me know if you need any help.
Good luck!
Reply
Posted December 8, 2009 at 10:24 pm
- Veron
  3439 comments
  
  Thanks. I am in the midst of moving my files over to MT now. I am also starting with a fresh WordPress installation and working on a new theme. Hopefully these things would help!
  Reply
  Posted December 8, 2009 at 10:47 pm
Lester Chan
13 comments

1. Any idea on what is the estimated number of concurrent visits you having on your site at any time?
2. How many SQL queries are done on each page?
3. About many WP Plugins you are using?
I see you are using W3 Total Cache. Have you tried WP-SuperCache?
I got about 250K monthly and 8K daily running on a dedicated server hosting few other of my friends site as well and it can cope.
I am guessing it maybe your host issue rather than your website issue.
Reply
Posted December 8, 2009 at 11:56 pm
- Veron
  3439 comments
  
  1. I had the Online Counters plugin removed a couple of weeks back to reduce the number of queries. But when it was installed it gave me figures ranging around 50 concurrent visitors within a 10-min time span during off peak hours, and 100 during peak hours.
  2. I have db caching enabled. After caching it’s 6 queries on the home page and 30 on the single posts.
  3. 39 plugins activated. I delete all unused plugins to be on the safe side.
  I used to run WP-SuperCache but switched over to W3 Total Cache for the CDN capability. Both seem to work just as well and I can’t tell if there’s any performance difference on the backend.
  Reply
  Posted December 9, 2009 at 12:07 am
  - Lester Chan
    13 comments
    
    Hmm the stats looks fine to me. Your images is on CDN and your queries averages about 30 per page sounds reasonable to me.
    Heard you moving on MT already? Have you considered looking at local hosting? I think local hosting is more reliable and they do not tend to oversell. When my site is on Dreamhost, they shutdown some of my plugins first then informing me saying my site is killing their server. But when I moved over to a localhost no such problem at all.
    Reply
    Posted December 9, 2009 at 9:56 am
    - uzyn
      18 comments
      
      LOL. Of course, hosting on a localhost won’t have much problems as it’s only catering to one user only.
      (I know that’s a typo, but it’s just so in context that it’s funny. Haha.)
      Reply
      Posted December 9, 2009 at 10:51 pm
      - Veron
        3439 comments
        
        lol!!
        Reply
        Posted December 12, 2009 at 2:43 am
    - Veron
      3439 comments
      
      Wow. I think this can happen with any hosting company. My very first host was a Singapore company, too. When the site grew and the host couldn’t support it anymore, I switched to a US host (Site5). Eventually I had the same experience that you had with Dreamhost. They shut down my site with no warning or notification. It even happened a few times. I had to email them myself to find out that they had shut my site down. It was then that they finally switched me to a dedicated server.
      Reply
      Posted December 12, 2009 at 2:41 am