The folks at SixApart have seen tremendous growth in TypePad their paid blogging service and outgrew the hosting facility they were in. As they have transitioned to the new facility they have had some down time due to servers just not being able to handle the load. They are bringing on more equipment and the move to the new data center will increase their bandwidth by three times and they will be able to increase the number of servers.
Traffic to a blog and blogs is good and bad. This site moves about a 150 gb of just website traffic a month alone which is up nearly 50% since last year. That means you all are reading but with that comes considerations I have not had to deal with in the past and one of the reasons I just spent over $1300.00 on a new dedicated server to transfer some secondary domains off this server and onto a box with about 10 times the horsepower and available storage.
For the life of me I never thought I would need 1 server dedicated to a single website but yet that is the case. I feel the pain SixApart is going thru I am thankful that I dont have customers screaming at me for the downtime. [SixApart]
I don’t generally scream at anyone for downtime. I hit’em where it counts, their pocketbook. I have several sites myself, which I choose to host on reseller accounts. It’s generally cheaper, with tons of space and bacndwidth, and lots of control over the domain accounts.The problems I do run into can usually be resolved with a couple of emails.
That being said, I’ve had a couple of hosting companies with more downtime than I’d like to have. When uptime falls to about 80% is when I start looking for a new host. It’s just something I don’t tollerate anymore. Of course, it’s a long way from the old days when I used the free webserver from M$, built and hosted my site, on my home system, over a 128kbps ISDN connection back in ’97. Ahhhh…. the good ole days. :) Of course, that was after I’d ran my own BBS back in the day…. now those were some good ole days indeed. :D