Thanks to some amazing efforts by Elwed things are running a bit better around here, but there’s only so much he can do and your’s truly didn’t do his homework properly before settling on a VPS service and, as a result, it’s underpowered for something like EE. The VPS guarantees us 256MB of RAM with a maximum possible RAM of 512MB and it turns out that the minimum EE should probably be run under is 512MB (the servers at pMachine Hosting are minimum 2GB). The folks at TekTonic do offer a 512MB guaranteed/1GB Maximum RAM solution—it’s the next service level up from what I have now—but the cost jumps from $28 to $53 a month and I don’t think I can afford that right now. I was telling Elwed that I have a dual proc Dell workstation with 2GB of RAM sitting right next to me if only I could afford the pipe to run a server off of it with.

The other possibility is looking at converting to a different platform such as Drupal, but I’m a big fan of EE and I hate to give it up. I’m familiar with it and how it works, it’s easy enough for my mother to use, and I’ve got a good relationship with the guys who produce it. There’s always the question of how well anything else would run in this environment as well given that most of the problem stems from being beaten to death by search engines. I know someone will suggest WordPress, but I’ve tried it and wasn’t happy with it. Don’t know that it’s evolved enough to change my mind yet.

So I’m looking at the very real possibility of throwing in the towel—at least on SEB for the moment—until I can afford to do things properly. I’ll have to find someplace to migrate some of the other blogs I host such as my mother’s, sister’s, and our family friend Darlene, but the others aren’t used so much that it’d be a problem if I took them down. I never thought SEB would get to be so popular that it’d bring about its own death, but it certainly seems headed in that direction.

Hang in there, more updates as I think of other possibilities…