yourfirstvisit.net Now Has 3.2 Dorkobytes of Breadwidth

On Friday I moved this site from one host to another, and by doing so gained 100 times the CPU capacity and 40 times the memory.

This seems to have had the desired effect of eliminating the “500 errors” the site was generating, and also to have had the secondary effect of making it scary fast.

Click around a bit and let me know what you think!

UNDER THE HOOD OF yourfirstvisit.net

This site is meant to have the look and feel of a website, but also provide the positive aspects of a blog.

The bloggy parts are the ability of people to comment, the catalog of most recent stuff on the right sidebar, the use of categories as an aid to findability (at the bottom of pages, headed “Related Stuff”), and the ease with which I can write and maintain material.

Combining the best aspects of a site and a blog makes it, depending on the topic, either a “blight” or a “slog.”

The underpinning software is WordPress.  WordPress has been great, but it’s a real resource hog.

For the last couple of months, the site had been  approaching or hitting the CPU limits imposed on it in its former shared hosting environment.  This meant that readers were getting “500 errors.”

I tried a million things to reduce unnecessary CPU cycles, and while some helped temporarily, the errors did not go away.

So I gave up on the shared server, and on Friday moved to a dedicated server.

This did not go perfectly and was then followed by human error, and there’s still some tune-ups to do.  But the move resulted in a ton more CPU and memory capacity (the site was also hitting memory resource limits), so the 500 errors from hitting resource limits should go away…

The new dedicated server is about 8x more expensive than the old shared server–but you all patronize enough of the advertisers and other partners of this site that this is affordable.  Thank you!

While this move was not made to speed things up, the added capacity has really seemed to make a huge difference to page loading times.

Click around a bit and tell me if you agree or if, once again, I’m kidding myself!