We went out for lunch on Friday to KFC and after stuffing my face with a nice Fillet Tower Meal I was just resting my head on the table thinking about things while the others were talking about… something. The MD knows me well enough now that means there´s some technical impending doom on the way. It´s also a dead giveaway when he asks me if something is possible and I respond with "Can´t be done".
Anyway, what was bothering me was that a series of sites had started to run slower and slower over the last few weeks. This is mostly becuase they are starting to get more and more hits from search engines, the SEO is kicking in a bit and so the traffic is rising fairly sharply. I´d spent all morning tinkering with the code in the templates and got the PHP execution time down to about half what it was but it hadn´t had much effect on the non-static pages. Only one answer to this – DB overload. There was no way I could optimise the DB queries any more so the only option was an upgrade. Luckily the current hosting package is a "Professional" package on a shared server.
I talked to the boss about it and we decided to upgrade to a dedicated server since the extra cost was worth it. But it got better than that when we looked at the options available. We currently have two "Professional" packages and a "Business" (Pfff.. right) package with the various domains spread accross them. Since there are basically two ´main´ projects (ones that´ll cause high server load) he said I could have two dedicated servers! Ace! We´re now gonna get a nice top of the range server and a mid-range server and spread the load accross them. Plus they´re solely ours so I get root access to them and everything. Sweet, I´m happy!
Just got to go and plan the switch accross without causing more than a few hours of downtime and without losing any database information… Easy Peasy!?!