Tutorial Magazine Blog

You might have some trouble visiting the site today, because I’m switching hosts for the second time in three days.

Why am I switching from MediaTemple? Well, first let me tell you why I wanted to host with them in the first place. On their website they boast that you for only $20/month get 1000 GB of bandwidth and 100 GB of ‘premium storage’ - whatever that means. Now, what I needed was bandwidth, and lots of it. TutorialMagazine is a graphic-intensive site, serving up many gigabytes a day of tutorial screenshots. I needed a host that could serve up these images and leave me room to grow. I thought MediaTemple was that host.

However, MediaTemple gives you a limit of 1000 GPUs per month. A GPU is a Grid Processing Unit, or a measure of how much server processing power your site is consuming. I assumed that I wouldn’t use anywhere near the allotted 33 GPUs per day (1000 GPUs/30 days in a month). However, I found that during the days I was on MediaTemple,  I used about 10 GPUs every day! Over the past month we’ve gotten around 1000 visitors a day, which isn’t much compared to some other great tutorial sites out there (like photoshoplady and tutsplus). I hope the site will grow, but with MediaTemple my growth would be capped at around 3000 visitors per day. It doesn’t matter if they offer a billion gigabytes of bandwidth, I still wouldn’t get to use them because of the GPU limit. Here’s a look at yesterdays GPU usage report:

Now, I did try to reduce my GPU usage by caching queries to the database and optimizing the site in general, but I didn’t see significant improvements.

I found ANHosting, that provide 5000GBs of bandwidth/month and only cost $6.95/month (when you sign up for two years), and I’m in the process of moving the entire site to their servers now. I did have an issue with cPanel not showing the correct bandwidth limit (it says 5000MB instead of 5000GB)..but a support guy told me in a live chat (very handy btw) that they would get it fixed.

So far, so good.

I’d love to hear about your MediaTemple/ANHosting experiences. Why not leave your comment below?

Well, the day has come and TutorialMagazine has been successfully moved to MediaTemple Hosting. Hopefully it will mean that I’ll have enough monthly bandwidth to support the massive spikes in traffic I’ve seen associated with compilations I’ve published. I’ll be posting the best tutorials of may tomorrow, so keep your eyes peeled for that. You can be the first to know by following TutorialMag on Twitter.

There might be some bugs stemming from the server move. Let me know in the comments or by email if you spot anything not working as it should.