Growing Pains

[DZComposer]

As many of you know, our community has grown significantly over the past year, even in the face of little SF news. It turns out that we may be getting a little too big for our current hosting arrangement.

I have been working on the Wiki, trying to get it populated, and I kept running into random 500 errors. They didn't make sense, so I contacted Dreamhost about them. I was informed that our php memory and cpu usage is tripping the limiting software they have to keep sites on shared hosting from using too much.

This means that SFO is getting close to the point of being too big for shared hosting. This is making it look like we may need to get a VPS. If we continue to grow, we will start seeing 500 errors in places we definitely do not want to see them, IE on the main site or here on the forums.

A VPS will give us the resources we need for our overhead, of course the issue is that VPSes cost more money (at least $300 /yr), and my cash flow right now is a bit tight. Don't worry, I'm not begging for donations, and I'm sure as hell not about to sell out and sell some ads. I want to make you guys aware of the situation so you know what is going on if you see 500 errors start popping up.

Now, that price is through Dreamhost. The company I get the game server from has somewhat cheaper prices (I'm paying around $200/yr for that), but I think I'd like the site to be on a managed host rather than an unmanaged one. Plus, it's a less-painful server move with less downtime to stay with DH.