TAG | hostpapa
Can you feel the speed? Hopeful you’ve noticed something at soLinkable over these past few days: It’s running much faster.
The server loads in less than 2 seconds...
How far we’ve come
When I first started almost 2 years ago, soLinkable was merely a side project. It was a chance for me to play around with PHP, javascript, and web design. Since then it’s grown to over 17000 users, serving more than 10000 unique visitors and 55000 pageviews each month. And as we’ve grown in size, so have our needs – It’s no surprise then that soLinkable would be going through some growing pains and big changes.
One of the biggest projects, which has been in the works for the past month, has been the move from shared hosting to a private server.
Now, you may be surprised to learn that soLinkable has been on a shared host this whole time. I’ve got to give credit where it’s due: HostPapa has provided us with exceptional service at a very cheap price. Even with some daily spikes of 800+ users, our servers held strong and never flinched. They were well worth the price, no question. My only complaint out of otherwise great service: They charged me $26 to transfer a “free” domain to me after I told them I wouldn’t be renewing my service… But that’s it.
Our new servers
Our search for a VPS brought us to Linode. Throughout my search they seemed like the obvious choice: Constant praise from their users, numerous benchmarks declaring them the fastest VPS available, full root access, well written libraries, and, of course, the excellent price ($20/month for 360MBs RAM/16GBs space/200GBs transfer). No matter what metric was being rated, Linode came out on top. Now, after a month and a half, I can honestly say all these claims have been verified.
Setting up the servers was a breeze. Through their excellent libraries and the helpful people on their irc channel, I had the entire server set up and functioning in a single night. Using linux can be daunting if you only have little previous experience (like me), but with help like this, learning is easy.
And lets not forget the speed. The transfer rate is impressive and the website load time has noticeably decreased. But where I’ve noticed the greatest improvement has been in the submission process – I can’t believe how fast it moves through each step.
Looking forward
Full access and modular servers also allow for easier development and scalability in the future.
With Linode, we have the ability to add on memory when we need it without moving the physical server (just a quick restart). Is the mySQL server starting to struggle? With a few mouse clicks I can allocate more memory to it in seconds, and alleviate the bottleneck.
Full root access means we have complete control over our environment. We can tweak the PHP and apache variables or install a 3rd party program and easily integrate it into the website – Basically, we can tailor the server to perform the way we envision, free of any restraints.
I’m sure we’ll go through more growing pains in the future, but with this upgrade behind us we are stronger than we’ve ever been before.