Performance Issues

Each month my blog goes through a cranky period. Yes, you read that right (almost as bad as Moody Monthly, the once publication of Moody Bible Institute). Yes, I have performance issues.

That’s because every month I exceed my bandwidth allowance on my hosting plan and when that happens things slow down. I already have what, for me, is an expensive plan, at $24.95 per month, which includes my domain name (that’s $299.40 per annum). That only gets me 8 Gigabytes of data transfer (bandwidth) per month, and I always exceed that – which is nice, of course. Details of my hosting plan are here.

I’m looking to upgrade to something that gives me a little more room, because the site slowing down really isn’t a good thing. Here’s what I would be looking for at a minimum:

• New Zealand Based
• Linux based
• 10 Gigabytes of storage (I must be able to store all my podcast eps on the server (not at a free storage site), and I am about to exceed my 2Gig limit here)
• Ideally at least 30 Gigabytes of bandwidth before performance is impacted (I always exceed my 8GB limit, currently using around 13GB in a light month, close to 19-20GB in a busy month)
• Domain based email
• MySQL
• The usual php capabilities
• A straight-forward control panel, preferably similar to the widely used Plesk control panel (Plesk itself would be great)

Are you in a position to help? Perhaps you know of a better deal than I’m currently getting. Perhaps you can offer a better deal than I’m currently getting. If either of these is the case, please let me know.