I’d like to let you guys in on my experiences of running a very large community site such as Dota Strategy. To be honest, it’s a stressful yet fun experience. Managing a site like this requires a ton of patience, perseverance and yes, a bit of money too. Initially, it was hosted on my shared account with Dreamhost, which I pay 20 bucks a month for to this day. But soon enough, I was forced to remove it because it was taking up too much resources and bogged down my server five times a day. Didn’t help that my users were hating me. So I moved Dota Strategy to a $90/mo. VPS plan with A Small Orange. The plan includes 512MB memory, 250GB Bandwidth, 20GB disk space and whatnot. The whole moving process was a nightmare. It took me forever to export and import my SQL database plus the domain wasn’t resolving to the new server as fast as I’d like it to. That caused some sort of a ‘time paradox’ as we lovingly call it. One set of users was accessing the old site while another set was seeing the new one. Sadly, I, the all-powerful owner and administrator ‘drew’, was seeing the old site. After one painful week I finally got things back to normal.
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