One of the things that we are very proud of here at the LAB is the fact that we are building OUR online niche business idea at the same time as we make it easy for you to build YOURS. By putting ourselves in the same position as our entrepreneurial customers, we can have a crystal-clear picture of how our products and services perform. This is perfectly exemplified by our standard server package, and how it is “just enough” to do the job well, but not “too much” to have resources sitting idle each month, costing our customers extra cash-flow.
One of the things that we do on a daily basis is to test our baseline servers right here on the LAB. In plain English, this means that we are NOT running any special VPS or Dedicated servers for our LabSecrets.com site or any of our test site. No indeed! We are running the exact same server setup that we provide to all of our LabSecrets Solution customers, with no modifications whatsoever.
Today we were running some tests (in the wee hours of the morning when most Lab customers are still in bed…) to see if we could ‘crash’ our own server when hitting the database hard. Since this is not exactly “rocket science” when running a basic server, we were successful with our nefarious plan (yay…!) and caused a memory limit error to show up after we activated more than 24 high-load plugins and ran them all at once, while simultaneously trying to upload some large images. If you were awake this morning, you were problaby wondering “what the heck is going on at the LAB with these messages…?”
What have we learned from this experiment is that one can pretty easily run a large set of plugins without concern for memory allocation settings, but that if you start to grow your site membership, database use, and plugin library, it is best to be aware of the warning signs that an upgrade to one of our very affordable VPS packages might be for you.
The warning signs will be quite clear. You will see something that looks like this:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 67108864 bytes exhausted ….
Never fear if you do see such a message, it is simply the canary in the coal mine, letting you know that you are pushing things a bit too hard. The remedy is simple, just go into your admin dashboard and disable any plugins that are are not currently using (mission-critical) and then contact us so we can discuss your options for optimizing your plugin library, or perhaps, for upgrading your server capacity. Either way, growth is good! It takes quite a bit of use in order to reach this threshold.
Having hands-on experience with the systems that are being used by our customers has made it possible for us to better service your needs, by providing a clearer understanding of events that might lead to potential pitfalls for our customers. There’s nothing better than having the cooks eat their own food to ensure that troops are happy and well-fed!
