Main Content

Rapid growth leads to server move

Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2008-07-17 11:45:22 - Graham Ellis

Here are some web site statistics for you ...

Over fifty thousand different visitors in the last seven days. Those visitors have called up over a quarter of a million pages (that's about five pages each), and each of those pages has called up one or two extra file such as images and style sheets - making a total of nearly three quarters of a million requests to the server. Total traffic transferred - some 24 Gbytes. Even the log files total some 175 Mbytes of data!

Can you believe those are our "stats" for the www.wellho.net site - our main web site that covers our Open Source training?

In the last 24 hours, 900 people have read our page that explains joins and left joins, 220 have read about using PHP and MySQL to store an image database, 240 have visited us to find out about Python threads, and over 6000 (yes, that's six thousand) accessed have been made to our source code resources which are listed subject by subject.

The growth has been dramatic over the last couple of years, and the shared server that we've been using is starting to creak a little - partly due to volume, and partly due to some clever background code that we're running - and which we want to develop further. So we're in the process of moving to a dedicated server which is being tested at present and should go live in the next week or so.

What difference will you see? Very little indeed at first - although you might notice a speed improvement if you're in the UK - the server being hosted in this country now. But the move will give us the chance to put in seriously recent software versions (Apache httpd up to 2.2, PHP up to 5.2, MySQL 5, for example) all of which are way ahead of the WSP's machine that we have been using. And then we'll be able to run other servers and you'll see Tomcat, Django, Ruby on Rails, Mason and more (Or perhaps you won't spot them if they're hidden behind regular URLs!)

Both PHP 5 and MySQL 5 are not quite as compatible as we might wish with the older versions (I should know - I teach the subjects!) but we don't expect any problems. And we will be doing a lot of testing too. However, with thousands of different URLs on our site we may overlook something and if we do can I ask you - friends reading this - to drop us a note if you spot something odd - graham@wellho.net. Thanks!