HG and a (rather) big site - resource usage?

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This Hostgator support thread was started by Isotonik on 2008-12-22 07:08:19:

Hello
This is a pre-sales question. I have currently an image gallery (~4000 images) based on 4images script and TextPattern blog. As far as I’ve seen, the CPU usage is a constant issue in shared plans and I’m pretty worried of potential usage of resources.

I have currently succeeded in minimizing the number of visitors using a free host restrictions provided by 4images (I have maybe two visitors per week but they seldom come back), but paid plans would offer more powerful tools to decrease the server load.

I plan to save server resources by a robots.txt file to block all indexing and creating excessive CIDR-based blocklists, which are designed to block the expected IP-ranges of my potential visitors. The final touch is carried out by creating quite restrictive permissions that block users from seeing full-size images. These procedures would evidently render my site quite unusable, but there would be little if any traffic.

Question: Do blocklists (which may consist of several hundred entries in CPanel) cause any additional strain to the server?

Clever users might try to bypass these restrictions by using proxies and there is little I could do about it, but I’ve planned to create TOS which prohibits using proxies and a tailored version of my current 403-page with the following text:

"Error 403 - Access denied. You attempted to enter a site hosted by Hostgator. Any HTTP-request from your IP-range is believed to cause excessive load to the servers. As a result, your request was denied. Every attempt to bypass these restrictions may result in report to your ISP and/or legal action against you. Please contact Hostgator.com for more information."

That should do it or do you have better suggestions? If you wish, I can use static HTML-pages if your servers can handle them better than PHP-scripts.

Thanx.

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