School Website ~ A victim of our own success ~ need urgent advice

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PaddyBloggit

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We have shared hosting with Let's Host.

The site has gotten very slow ever since we were moved to a 'newer server'.

Having spoken to Let's Host, they now say we need to move to a VPS server as our site is using so many resources, not only is it slowing down our own sites, it's also slowing down other websites on the shared server.

If we don't move to a vps server we will lose service as they won't allow us remain on a shared server.

Our school site is built using WordPress. I have two other sites in subfolders - one listing homework and where pupils can upload their homework, the other is a dedicated science & maths website where pupils post their own reports - both sites use wordpress.

Our basic package to date (based on latest invoices) costs us €207.60 every two years.

Let's Host wants us to move to plan 3 which would cost us €55 per month for the dedicated server & €9.99 for the cpanel license per month. Total bill per annum would be hitting the €700 mark - totally out of our range (we're a primary school)

Our site is extremely progressive but our success is now killing us. The school is unlikely to be able to pay the €700 annual fee for dedicated hosting/domain registration and turning the site into a static site is looking ever so likely.

(I'm doing a backup at the moment with a view to delection if necessary)


What are my choices so that I can keep our sites alive?
What are the comparable companies out there?

If I was to approach a company for sponsorship, are there tax breaks for them that I could mention?

What's Blacknight like? etc.

Thanks
 
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mneylon

Administrator
Staff member
Have you got caching setup in Wordpress?
Have you checked which plugins you're using?
Without caching Wordpress can be a resource hog and some plugins, while popular, are quite badly written and can increase the load on a site considerably.

With respect to sponsorship and tax breaks - there aren't any unless you're a registered charity (as far as I'm aware)
 

PaddyBloggit

New Member
I have caching set up and I have done a clean out of the database.

I am beginning to suspect that a photo gallery plugin could be the culprit .... I'm going to disable it and see what happens. (I can't disable it at the moment as the site dashboard won't load)

What amazes me is that the two sites set up as follows open up quite quickly while the main site doesn't

site.ie/subsite and site.ie/subsite2 - no problem opening.

Perhaps I was too ambitious with the site. I'm going to disable all around me as I'm on borrowed time. I'm surprised Let's Host hasn't shut us down already if we're such a load on the shared server.

As an aside ... I tried to do a remote backup of everything but it only backed up some of it before the backup was deleted in the root of our Let's Host space - I was going to save all - then delete. We have used 7 gb of our 15 gb allocation.
 

PaddyBloggit

New Member
All sorted. Backup of site taken (for posterity). Files/Folders etc. deleted. Simple landing page planned.

Unfortunately there's no more money in the pot so site development has to go.

Thanks for all your help mneylon. 'Tis much appreciated.
 
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