FreeTeams originally started on a shared server way back in June 2007.  Shared servers are very inexpensive, and great for starting new blogs, personal websites, and small business sites.  It was something like $7 per month at the time, and for a bootstrapped company with no business loans or outside investors giving us money to splurge on infrastructure, that is a great selling point.  We were using DreamHost for those who care; it’s great, inexpensive, and I have been using them since 2004 and still do for other websites.  Shared servers are not meant to house large websites with thousands of unique visitors per day, and as soon as we started getting a decent amount of traffic we would need to move to a dedicated server that services only our one website, and not a few dozen others as well.  

Now, you may ask why we didn’t just go with a dedicated server to start with?  Well at the time (and still happens to be the case today), dedicated servers with great support would have run me about $200 a month.  Compared with $7 per month and with little revenue coming in, that would have burned a huge hole in my wallet, especially with no idea of when the site would warrant that kind of a server.

Luckily the site grew fast enough that it only took us 6 months to get too big for our shared hosting, and in February of 2008 we got in touch with Liquid Web to purchase a dedicated server for FreeTeams.  Liquid Web offers a very extensive support service that allows me to spend a lot less time worrying about keeping the server updated and running smoothly, and spend more time with support requests and adding new features.

We have been on the same server for a little over three years now, and have had to upgrade it a couple of times over the year with bigger hard drives for your photos (eventually leading to working with Amazon) and additional RAM as we have had more and more visitors coming to the site each day.  Unfortunately when we purchased the server, it was using a 32 bit operating system.  The reason this is bad is that it limits the amount of RAM we can add to the server.  We might be able to physically add more memory, but the operating system can only actually use just over 3 Gigabytes software-wise.  

When Liquid Web came out with a new line of servers earlier this year, I took a look at their offerings and it turns out I can get a much more powerful server with more memory for about 1/3 less money than I am currently paying.  Don’t worry, it includes a 64-bit operating system this time, so memory will not be a limiting issue as we grow.

We are currently migrating all our data to the new server and will be making the switch over the weekend, and we will hopefully have no more than a few minutes of downtime.  If there are any issues, you can follow them on our blog here as it is not hosted on our server.