As you will have noticed, podlogs is in the midst of an upgrade. I started with upgrades to the core systems (wordpressMU and buddypress) and have now moved on to upgrading the themes to make more use of buddypress and am sorting out the widgets.
Once I am finished with these software upgrades I have a big decision to make with regards to hosting. You may have noticed that podlogs has become rather sluggish recently. This is in part because some of the cool new features (such as the activity stream) are a bit more CPU intensive, but it is mostly because podlogs is becoming a lot more active. Things are ok for now, but some time in the not too distant future I will have to upgrade the hosting package podlogs is currently on.
Hosting History
When I first started podlogs, the site was running very smoothly on a £5.00 a month hosting package. It quickly became very popular (around 600 blogs are hosted here) and the hosting began to struggle. That sort of shared hosting is ok to begin with, but you are on a server with several hundred other people. So if your site has anything CPU intensive you need something with a bit more guts.
The next stage up was ”semi dedicated” which with my provider costs £30.00 a month. This basically means that rather than sharing a server with hundreds of other accounts, Podlogs now shares its hosting with just a handful of other accounts. I could have shopped around a bit more at the time, but it was a pretty fair price for what I was getting and the upgrade process was 100% hassle free as their technical support team did all the work. It was around the time of the upgrade that I was forced to put the google adverts on the site to help pay for things. These have actually worked out quite well. To begin while the hosting package was surplus to requirements I was making a small loss, and more recently as we approach capacity I have been making a small profit (The ads currently bring in £1.00-3.00 per day)
Decision time
I have narrowed the field down to two options:
- I keep with the same hosting company and move to a dedicated server. The transition will be smooth, but the step up in price is astronomical. The cheapest dedicated server they do costs £115 a month (without backup, which is an extra £15 a month) Even assuming I manage to get £3.00 a day from advertising (which is optimistic) That still leaves me £40 short each month, which for a website that started out in life as a hobby is a bit steep.
- I move to a cloud VPS (VPS = Virtual Private Server) I have found a rather nice hosting company called vps.net they set you up with a virtual server that can vary its CPU power depending on what your demand is. Its a modular package, with each £15 node giving 0.6GHz of Dedicated CPU, 376MB of ram 10GB of storage and 250GB of monthly file transfer. This will allow the server to scale with the site traffic a little better and should mean that for £57* a month we can have a better server than we currently have now. The only real drawback with this that I can see is that the upgrade process will be pretty time intensive for me.
Premium Accounts
Premium accounts will cost somewhere between £3 and £5 a month. For that monthly fee you will get an advert free theme and unlimited file uploads (you are currently limited to 100mb). You will also have the option of a custom theme for a one off charge of £10.
Another option I am toying with is the ability to buy and apply your own domain names to your blog, while still being plugged into the podlogs community. There is a plugin out there that will do this, I just need to work out if I can get it configured on my hosting package.
At the moment these details are subject to change. I want to work out what demand will be like before I come to a final decision. If you would be interested in upgrading to a premium account please reply to this post.
So Podlogs is a business now!?
Podlogs was never supposed to be a business venture; it has always been more of a hobby. However it has become clear that the current way of running things has a very big chance of burning a hole in my wallet when with a little work I can probably turn it around and make it a nice little side earner. This benifits you, my members as you get a better service and it benifits me with a nice little bit of income.
* £45.00 (3x nodes) + £7.50 (cpanel operating system) + £5.00 (cheap backup option, premium backup is £15)