Saving Memory on Media Temple’s (dv) Hosting

Nowadays, virtualised hosting (often called a Virtual Private Server) offers a great mid-range option, giving isolated software on shared hardware for tens of dollars per month. It’s the minimum I’d recommend for things like ecommerce.

A couple of my clients are using Media Temple’s Dedicated-Virtual hosting, which is based on Virtuozzo & Plesk and works pretty well (after some initial glitches for one client). The Base option’s 256MB gets filled fairly easily though, so after a client’s site hit 85-90% resource usage I tried the following tweaks:

Days later it’s settled at a comfortable 36%, and although that may creep up it’ll save the client from paying for an upgrade for the foreseeable future. You can get similar levels of improvement with most VPSs and dedicated servers by disabling unused services and tweaking Apache, and as long as you read some guides, try one thing at a time and back up config files it’s not too risky.

Wed 14th May 2008, 8:27pm GMT

Filed under: E-commerce, Hints and Tips, Software, Web