I’ve got a few hobby & Linux-resource websites running. I’ve moved them from the ether and put an old dell server in my office. They seem to be a bit slow to load in a web browser. They are here: Welcome to Swerdna’s Linux Blog
I have these plans available from my ISP:
down/up = 8000/128 kb/s <== this is my current plan
down/up = 1500/256 kb/s
down/up = 8000/384 kb/s
down/up = 20000/1000 kb/s
down/up = 30000/1000 kb/s
I only get low visitor rates of course; circa 40-60000 pm depending on release cycle.
I plan to add some more sites during the year, two commercial sites, but that won’t increase the traffic much.
Here’s the question: what plan should I choose to get the pages to load faster for visitors? I can’t just go for the fastest, it’s far too expensive. Where does the speed/efficiency/advantage for visitors experience cease? (I know pretty much nothing about these rates and upload requirements).
I’m with Malcolm too as far as the basic principle of ratio goes. But honestly, if ISP’s in AU are anything like they are here, you’ll want to read the T&C like it was your new found religion
its hard to decide the actual real value of high availability
(constant backedup power, fall over, etc) but, i think if you take
that into account you will find that there are several hosting
packages available for not a heck of a lot more money that just
electricity, hardware turnover, ISP charges and etc (like noise and
heat in the office)…
and, there are thousands of big hosting site all over the earth,
most all of which are gonna present at least as big as ISP’s largest,
at the default price…
i long ago decided to put all of mine on host and administer from
afar…been using dotster.com for years and years…been so happy with
their uptime i’ve not checked competition (1&1, rackspace, etc, etc)
in a long while…
The problem with hosting at home is getting a good upload rate. They do not want you to have that. If they do, they want you to pay way too much for it. I have found that it is a lot cheaper to pay for a hosted site at a place like 1&1, or GoDaddy. They already have huge amounts of bandwidth available, so your visitors will always get a speedy page load.
I have had very good service from 1&1 and their prices are hard to beat. When I had problems, I could make one phone call and get a real live person on the phone in minutes and get it fixed. I don’t know if they have local support numbers for down under. However, there has to be good places that do.
I tried hosting my own a few years ago and then went to 1&1 and never looked back.
The performance depends more on the contents of your websites than the upload bandwidth. I have 3 different webservers attached to rather slow ADSL lines and they perform well. Large PDF’s and flash are a killer item and streaming video is a no go. But if you stick to html and small graphics a 384 kb/s upstream line will do.
When there are downloads at the same time you may need to do some bandwidth throttling (/usr/sbin/tc). This gives you almost full download speed and keeps the upstream free for use at the same time.
Thanks for that ppl; I will probably move back to the ether when I can spare the time (not a small job). In the interim I’ll try the 384 kb/s option for a month or so and see if it gets “faster” in the browser; I’m a vanilla kind of guy so no flash or large PDFs on the site.
I’ve been referring to your site(s) for a couple of years now, and the pages still load quite quickly, perhaps a little bit faster than before. So, assuming you’'ve made changes as you’d planned, those changes haven’t affected your site’s useability (IMHO).
That’s a very subjective judgment, as I’ve not had any reason to be storing hard data on your site’ performance, and I’m on a remote island in the southern Bahamas with a connection that’s unreliable on a good day, , but maybe it’ll help you in your thinking.
BTW. Thank you so much for your continuing efforts to share your knowledge with the rest of us. Your pages are a wonderful resource, and I refer to them often.
@caprus thanks for the advice and the compliments.
If they load readily with your poor connection, I’ve not got much to worry about at the moment. In the future as I add a few more domain names, I’ll monitor the situation, but from what you say, there’s no problem right now, thanks.
