If you’ve managed to get any kind of decent access to UKB over the last month, then congratulations
I’ve spent the best part of today (and much of the last week) talking with the hosting provider, since they are “throttling” access to UKB. The website lives on a shared server and they can’t allow us to affect other websites (understandably!) that live on the same server. After much investigation, it seems that UKB (especially in this amazing season) has become too successful (!) and, no matter how much I optimise the website to reduce the resources used on the server, the one factor that I cannot control is the number of simultaneous visitors. In essence, it’s got to the point where radical thinking is required.
After much thought, I’ve decided that we’re just going to have to put up with the current performance issues for the time being, largely because I’m snowed under with work (proper work, that is) and will be on holiday before the summer is over. But the holiday will also give me time to think about what we do.
An obvious option is to upgrade to a "Virtual Private Server" that is dedicated to UKB, is on a shared machine [that’s the “virtual bit”], but does not, most importantly, share resources such as RAM and disk space, which would be ring-fenced just for us. If this is gobbledegook to you then don’t worry - the point is that we’d never ever get throttled again! The big problem is that this solution is really expensive. While I’ve covered the cost of hosting UKB myself since it started, I won’t be able to do this moving forward if we take this approach. Given the number of images and other files we host, we need a solution that will cost us between £45 and £89 per month (I need to confirm the configuration we need). Although we would be able to reinstate the images I had to remove to keep the file count below 300,000
In summary - a significant change is in order and it’s time to “raise the bar” once again (at least, that’s how I see it).
If you do have any ideas / comments, then do let me know. You can always email me directly at pete@ukbutterflies.co.uk. And thanks to those of you that have offered help in the past .. I'll be in touch in due course. Signing up a major sponsor would clearly be an option
If you work for, or know, an organisation that is willing to cover the costs (let's assume £3000 to cover a 3-year sponsorship deal, as a ballpark figure) then do let me know!Cheers,
- Pete
