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I have moved the site over to it's own dedicated VPS. This means that I no longer have to share resources, incoming/outgoing data lines, processing time, memory or other peoples bad programming habits.
For you this means a shiny new faster service...
Conanstevens.com will now load pages faster for you, reducing your waiting time, and you should find this a rather significant improvement. Browsing the photo galleries should now be painless.
To go into technical terms I was previously on a shared host and have now moved onto a part of a machine set up to act like a seperate server computer.
Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is what I previously had with Dreamhost. A shared host account is one server computer, often in the case of cheap hosting a standard desktop computer in a rack mount.
This computer then has it's harddrive partitioned off into smaller pieces and each part is given to a customer. In effect you share a computer with many other hosts.
This has the benefit of being cheap and if anything goes wrong your hosting company has to fix it for you.
Shared hosting has the disadvantages of it takes them a while to get around to fixing things and because there is such crowding (it's better for profits) then your website(s) will run slow.
The shared hosting also has the disadvantage of you cannot do everything you want with your server, in fact you can barely get any changes made from your hosts standard configuration.
This is a problem if your host has not optimised their databases or configurations for speed (often not - they are usually left as standard as possible to minimise support queries).
VPS - Virtual Private Server
A VPS is again a computer that is divided up to smaller parts to resell to customers but with a big difference - you gain total control.
Instead of putting everyone on a computer box and letting them fight over resources the VPS puts less people onto each computer and runs them on a virtual computer.
This means that you have an invisible software layer running that gives you a server space that looks and feels and acts just like it's own stand alone machine. Of course your virtual machine is not as fast as a dedicated server compputer but it costs a whole lot less and you can cluster the virtual servers (join them in a network) that will give you greater flexability and speed gains over a stand alone machine.
So through the VPS we now have total control of the website.
My friend Peter who is one of hte best web programmers in Australia (or out of it as, like me, he no longer lives there) helped me set up the new VPS with different software than usual that is faster and better optimised for my site.
What this means is that I now have a faster website, I pay 5* the price I was paying before (this is covered by the earnings from Google Adsense) but I get more visitors (as Google ranks faster, dedicated sites better than shared hosts) and the visitors wil lstay longer and browse more pages as they won't get bored sh!tless waiting for the pages to load.... anymore.
The other upside is, and this is what prompted the move, that when I get a massive traffic surge like I did when the Movie sites found my article on the John Rambo 4 Script I do not have to worry about some idiot atmy webhost disabling my account because I am using to many resources on the shared machine.
As it stands now for about 5* the price of shared hosting I get a faster website overall and the capability to handle about 20 to 30 times the traffic (possibly more). AND if I get hit with a sudden and ongoing traffic swarm I can then just log into my VPS account pay with my credit card and 15 minutes later I have upgraded my VPS hosting plan.
This is in preparation for some of my movies coming out, if they do well on DVD internationally I can expect a decent hit of traffic and the last thing I want ot happen just when my self promotions start to take off is to have it all collapse in a heap.
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