Blog Notes and the Throttled Website

POSTED ON Apr 11, 2012

Joel Friedlander

Written by Joel Friedlander

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Important Note:

TheBookDesigner.com will be offline Wednesday night – Thursday morning (depending on where you’re located) for 1 – 4 hours while we switch to a new server.

Switching Servers for Better Performance

My little blog on book design has been growing. As the articles and other features on the blog have increased, they have attracted steadily more people who are looking for answers to their questions about publishing, and for that I’m grateful.

Other offerings have also expanded, and the eBookConversionDirectory, a couple of dormant blogs, and the site I’m building for my new online training course, the Self-Publishing Roadmap, are all hosted on the same account.

This is known as “shared hosting” because the servers at Bluehost.com, my internet service provider have many sites on the same servers.

Recently you might have encountered errors or delays when you’re trying to access the blog, like this one I received today:

blogging

Or maybe you just ended up staring at the little spinny thing go around and around while you waited.

I hate when that happens. My blog technician didn’t have a ready answer, although he tried various caching plugins and other secret ninja stuff blog technicians know about.

Chat sessions with Bluehost.com didn’t help either. I mean, who needs 100 pages of PDFs on how to optimize your blog when it won’t even load?

Eventually, mostly out of frustration, I started noodling around inside my account, and soon stumbled on something called “CPU Throttling.”

Sure enough, that was the reason for the poor performance:

throttling

Oh, yes. Unbeknownst to me, during just one 24-hour cycle, my account at Bluehost.com was “throttled” 48,729 seconds. Don’t reach for your calculator, that amounts to over 13 hours.

I really can’t complain, since Bluehost is generally a great ISP, and their prices are incredibly low. But those low prices come with their own costs, and the biggest cost is that you are essentially on a “party line” used by lots of other people.

If the ISP thinks you are using too many “resources” they will limit your bandwidth, or “throttle” your site.

So I bit the bullet. We backed up all the sites today, and will change to a better server system that Bluehost offers (at an upcharge, of course).

I hope this solves the delays and other problems, and improves your experience here at The Book Designer. That’s the whole point.

Come by on Sunday for the latest installment of our monthly eBook Cover Design Awards. There are 67 covers in this month’s contest, and some real beauties. Check back in, I wouldn’t want you to miss it.

Photo by Beraldo Leal

Joel Friedlander

Written by
Joel Friedlander

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