Heavy Load on Site, Forcing Visitors to Register

[ZomgStuff]

Well lately I've been exceeding my shared hosting's CPU quota by having very many SQL queries. Obviously one thing I can do is try to get rid of extra mods, and try to optimize the queries.
Past couple of days I've been averaging 50-70 people on, and many times reaching high 90's during peak hours.

But for now I decided to force guests to register to see forum content. Now obviously this would limit search spiders for google and yahoo. Is there any way to allow just google to see the content and force the rest to register? Perhaps somehow using useragents?

Thank you in advance.

[Lynne]

Take a look at googles webmasters guides and see what they think of cloaking (which is what you are talking about doing):

Cloaking: Serving different content to users than to Googlebot. This is a violation of our webmaster guidelines. If the file that Googlebot sees is not identical to the file that a typical user sees, then you're in a high-risk category. A program such as md5sum or diff can compute a hash to verify that two different files are identical.

You may find this article interesting when looking at your queries per page - How Many Queries on a New Installation

[ZomgStuff]

Is there a plugin or mod that will allow me to see how many hooks and queries are executed on each page load?

[Lynne]

If you have a test site, just enable debug mode by putting this somewhere between the first and last line in your config.php page:

PHP Code:

$config['Misc']['debug'] = true; 


There is also this hack which will tell you the number of queries and more:
Microstats - load times, server loads, queries, uncached templates

[NoeJeko]

Shared hosting isn't the best for an active forum. If you're running into this issue, you should look at getting a dedicated host.

I rented a single proc dual core Xeon from ThePlanet for $159/month. If you're at the point you need a dedicated host, then you can probably recoup a lot of that cost from ads. I was breaking even on ads until I had to upgrade my box because a single proc couldn't handle 400+ concurrent users.

In addition to Google's stance on cloaking, you can actually open a security vulnerability here. If someone spoofs their useragent string and you're not checking against IP addresses - they can access your site at whatever level you allow the spiders. I've had users try it on my board and I don't even use this method.

[ZomgStuff]

Problem is that I cannot afford $100+ a month as my userbase isn't that big. I'm just going to have to cut down on some features.

I appreciate your help.

[ssslippy]

Ask for donations from your members. If you have a solid active user base people dont mind donating 10 bucks a month even setup subscriptions with bonus.

[azn_romeo_4u]

ummm....

for 50-70 people online you shouldn't even being getting anything close to a dedicated box. You probably aren't getting that throughout the day, and 50-70 isn't that much either.

Here's some simple tricks. Turn off...

1) Sigs for guest
2) Avators for guest
3) Other informational stuff (like post count, reputation etc)

You can move hosts, if you current host sucks. There's a ton of reputable hosts out there that can handle 50-70 users online. The host you are on, must suck IMO if it can't handle that.

If you really need to move up, I would go with a Virtual Private Server. A lot cheaper than getting a dedi box which you probably won't even need right now and probably don't even know how to use. Start out with the VPS. It's sorta like a dedi and it'll help you on your way once you actually need a Dedi.

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=104

Checkout that site for some good deals.