Many thanks to Fenyx4 from the Codex, who dropped some coin in the tip jar at the end of February to help offset the increased costs of running the site that I’ve lately been having to deal with.

Aiera has seen some tremendous growth in the last couple of years. Since I started tracking stats on the site, I’ve served up nearly half a million page loads to tens of thousands of unique visitors. This year, after only two full months (and a week), I’ve served up half the number of page loads that I served up in 2010; the count of unique visitors is at about 50% of last year’s total.

This after one sixth of a year. But let me put it another way: after today, Aiera will have seen more traffic in 2011 than it saw in all of 2009. In other words: 2011 is shaping up to be a huge year for the site, the best it’s ever seen. Unless I do something to screw that all up, of course. But let’s assume I won’t.

This growth comes at a price, though; for the last few months, I’ve been exceeding my “performance budget” on my server. Mediatemple are generous enough hosts; their (gs) hosting package has proven robust enough to survive a Felicialanche^[1], their management features are excellent, and if their uptime isn’t exactly “five 9s”, at least their support response is both personable and swift.

But everything has limits. With my (gs) package, I’m given 1000 “performance units” (what I call my “performance budget” above) — which equate to a certain percentage of processor time (measured per hour) on the servers Aiera is hosted on — every month. If I exceed that budget, I get charged $0.10 per additional performance unit consumed. And for the last couple of months, I have been consuming more than my performance budget, to the tune of between 800 and 1700 additional units.

Now, I’ve been doing what I can to try and curb the site’s consumption of that performance budget. More aggressive caching is in place, image sizes and qualities have been reduced where possible, and I’m just trying to figure out how to install the APC PECL extension on my (gs) package, which should help. But let’s face it: the site has grown, and is continuing to grow. And either it needs to expand into more robust hosting (which would probably mean a bit of an outage, since I would really only have time to do a piecemeal migration rather than an “all at once” effort), or I’ll need some help to offset the cost of maintaining the current hosting.

Do feel free to discuss. In the meantime, I’ve added Fenyx4 to the acknowledgements page, as a kind of permanent note of thanks for his support.

[1] The avalanche of traffic resulting from being retweeted by Felicia Day. See also: Slashdotted, Instalanche.