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Sparklette Needs Your Help!

Sparklette Needs Your Help!

By Veron | Posted in Site News
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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.


For more restaurant reviews, deals and goodies, find @Sparklette on Twitter and Facebook.

About the Author
Veron Ang

Veron Ang is the founder and chief editor of Sparklette. She lives in Singapore and has dined and traveled across the world. She also runs Sparklette Studio, a web design and WordPress development firm. If you'd like to connect with her, head on over to the contact page or follow her personal updates on Twitter: @VeronSG.


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Comments 33 responses Leave your comment Leave your comment

  1. Design Ideas
    December 8
     

    Nice post. Thanks!

    Reply

  2. KahWee
    December 8
     

    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

    • VeronTwitter
      December 8
       

      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

      • NicholasTwitter
        December 9
         

        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

        • VeronTwitter
          December 9
           

          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

          • NicholasTwitter
            December 9
             

            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

  3. pkchukiss
    December 8
     

    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

    • VeronTwitter
      December 8
       

      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

  4. DT
    December 8
     

    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

    • VeronTwitter
      December 8
       

      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
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