How many servers has your pet site out grew?

[cpvr]

So, I know a lot of pet sites usually start off with either shared hosting - or a dedicated server. I know Ichumon opened up on a shared host - and I believe Misticpets did as well, so the question is - how many servers has your pet site out grew?

Has it just gone from a shared host to a dedicated server? Or has it gone through multiple server changes and upgrades?

[Onyx]

Both my sites started with their own dedicated servers. Khimeros is a bit of a resource hog, and we've added RAM a couple of times. Pretty soon we're going to add a second server to be our image server while keeping our current dedicated. Aluriya is a pretty different animal from Khimeros, and I don't imagine that we'll grow out of our dedicated server any time soon. We intentionally designed it to be a lighter than Khimeros.

[GGitzOle]

Actually we opened on VPS then went dedicated and went through about 3 or 4 different dedicated hosts XP

[cpvr]

Both my sites started with their own dedicated servers. Khimeros is a bit of a resource hog, and we've added RAM a couple of times. Pretty soon we're going to add a second server to be our image server while keeping our current dedicated. Aluriya is a pretty different animal from Khimeros, and I don't imagine that we'll grow out of our dedicated server any time soon. We intentionally designed it to be a lighter than Khimeros.

Why is Kmimeros such a resource hog? Are the pages pretty intensed - in terms of queries and such? What are the server stats?

Actually we opened on VPS then went dedicated and went through about 3 or 4 different dedicated hosts XP

What company did you use for the VPS? What companies did you use and why so many different servers?

[Slashmaster]

Aywas is sitting comfortably on its server. It hasn't had any troubles yet. There are some spots of lag but that's because of a botter I keep having to IP ban.

[Keith]

Subeta has... gone through a lot of companies, heh. Right now we're pretty happy with Softlayer (we were with ThePlanet, but they recently merged) however we're looking to move to RackSpace sometime in the future. We're currently in talks with them about having a dedicated MySQL box (our's is currently super powerful. 40GB of memory, with two SSD's) and the rest of the servers powered in "the cloud".

[Claws]

IcePets is still on the same basic $10 a month shared hosting, considering we haven't made any moves for major growth yet and the site being optimized enough to handle 40 or so online players without needing to upgrade.

[Onyx]

Khimeros is a resource hog because our images are huge, plus we have a lot of really complicated, involved features. Our pets have a ton of layers, though we recently reduced this by half, by changing how pet hybridization works.

We currently use LiquidWeb for hosting, I'm not all that thrilled with them though. Often when we have a question it doesn't seem like they really know what they're talking about. We've had the same errors occur on Aluriya that happened on Khimeros when we opened ("forgetting" to switch the bandwidth settings, so that the site would go down when their systems thought we were still operating on a shared server and using too many resources). We also had to get our own apache guy to optimize the settings when we were having issues with khimeros during alpha, and LW couldn't figure it out (though our Apache guy spotted the problem in five minutes). Perhaps we'll end up changing hosts eventually.

[cpvr]

We currently use LiquidWeb for hosting, I'm not all that thrilled with them though. Often when we have a question it doesn't seem like they really know what they're talking about. We've had the same errors occur on Aluriya that happened on Khimeros when we opened ("forgetting" to switch the bandwidth settings, so that the site would go down when their systems thought we were still operating on a shared server and using too many resources). We also had to get our own apache guy to optimize the settings when we were having issues with khimeros during alpha, and LW couldn't figure it out (though our Apache guy spotted the problem in five minutes). Perhaps we'll end up changing hosts eventually.

Ya, I know a lot of pet sites usually don't do well with LW unless their scripts are well optimized. We had a server with them and everything went well, but then again, when we ran the server on Zetapets with them sometimes we had a lot of lag because of how poor the scripts were.

[Onyx]

Oh, our scripts are well optimized, and the sites run very well on their servers in normal times, that's not the problem xD (If your scripts are not well optimized I don't see how they are going to run well on any server, really). It's that when something actually goes wrong and you contact them to try to fix it, they are kind of clueless. I'm talking about issues on their end, for example when they change some kind of permission without alerting us, etc. Or like, a few months ago they "updated" some security feature that did not even affect us, and caused Aluriya to completely crash and corrupted our database. Right away we contacted them and told them NOT to run the update on Khimeros, because we didn't want Khimeros crashing too. And yet, an hour later... Khimeros crashes. They went ahead and did the update despite being asked not to. Luckily, we were finally able to prevail upon them to revert the update, and Nas was able to retrieve Alu's database. Khimeros has hourly backups, so it was easy to just restart from backups, but still. If they had listened to us in the first place, it would never have happened.