Time for a dedicated server
I’ve managed 6 months with two Virtual Private Servers from Jaguar PC. One server runs the chatroom and one server runs everything else. I’ve been pretty happy with it (other than the occasional outage but I think that the time has come for an upgrade to a dedicated box.
The performance is getting a bit sluggish when it’s busy and I given that my traffic is still increasing pretty dramatically in terms of hits (hits are a useless measure for measuring popularity of a site but are a great measure for the load on the server) and the traffic is also rocketing towards my bandwidth allocation.
On the positive side advertising revenue has risen too so I can afford the move. I’m going to stick with Jaguar PC and order their basic AMD 3500, 1 GB memory, 160 GB drive with Debian. I’ll get rid of both VPS’s and I will work this year towards getting the chatroom migrated away to a hosted service.