This is something on the horizon that I am excited about. Since Nevergrind is actually making some decent money, I am considering re-investing by upgrading to a dedicated host. This costs more money, but really opens up my options in terms of what I can and cannot do. One key example that comes to mind is installing something like Ratchet to allow for server-side events using websockets. Using schedule events (crontab) is another biggie. And plus I'd have command line/root access. All goodies I'd love to have. It would remove any concerns about database size, too, since I wouldn't even need to rely on phpmyadmin anymore.

That's all. Just wanted to mention it.

Whats that all mean in english?

Stuff will probably improve in the future.

I'm actually curious. That is all wizardry to me. By getting a new dedicated host, does that mean you rent a better server at a site somewhere. Or does that mean you are thinking of buying better equipment? Also what does server side events mean? Is that code jargon or is that like running some special event in the game?

When you host a website, you don't typically set it up and configure a server in your basement. You typically pay a provider for web hosting services via a variety of plans. Typically they offer shared hosting, VPS (VM), and dedicated hosting. Shared hosting is fine for about 98% of people's websites. But if you do anything that hogs significant bandwidth like a lot of video and audio downloads, you will probably get your website shut down on shared hosting. In fact, that's exactly what happened last year in August. We had a traffic spike and we were sucking way too many resources, so our web host shut down our website.

As a result we basically had to upgrade to VPS for more resources (bandwidth). The VPS plan gives you way more resources and control and that's what Nevergrind has been on since August. But you still don't really have complete access to an entire rack-installed box. You are just given a significantly larger slice of the resources on a server.

A dedicated host is pretty much the best plan you can get because you own everything on the server and you can configure it however you wish.

Whew, I took a look today. The cheapest option for dedicated hosting is $149! I'm not quite sure I can justify it yet. I might have to find some workarounds. My current VPS only costs $60 a month.