I'm participating in a web project. It's a Joomla web page and it's gained a lot of visitors in the past months. Actually we are receiving donations each year to pay site's  hosting and domain. The concurrence now is extremely high and we don't really want to use advertisement as business model 'cause a philosophy matter. We can not afford a dedicated server 'cause we are a non-profit community.So my question is: Is there any way to solve 503 issue because of the high concurrence without migrating to a more expensive hosting plan ? Can I place the site in different hosts or something cheaper ?Thank you very much.
How to solve 503 issue
web hosting;joomla;page speed;load time;http code 503
It's a tough one to answer since you may need better hosting no matter what you do due to the sheer amount of visitors you have at once. But just like a car if you want to make it faster you throw out things you don't need which add weight to the car, by removing the weight you go faster.So you really want to focus on reducing requests on your server by optimising the pages and reducing requests (1 image = 1 request, 1 Javascript = 1 request, reduce these and you should get more performance).A few things you can doUse PNG Sprites on the template images compress your Jpegs and PNG files using lossless compression (Smushit.com)Ensure GZIP is enabled (mod_deflate)Enable a cache of 2 weeks on media files (mod_expires)combined and minify css and js filesensure your only loading JS on the pages that are using it. For example if you have a gallery page which uses a gallery javascript then you should only load the JS on this page if not used on any other pages, this will lower the amount of requests.Optimise your Database: Joomla has a few plugins that you can optmise your database (ensure you do a backup)Consider using a CDN network for your media files, template images, javascripts, template css etc. this lowers the requests on the server and is very cheap (Rackspace for example 12p per a GB - Pay as you go)Constantly test your website thoughout the optimising process and use Google Pagespeed and Web Page Test as some indicators what you can improve on. I could go on and on but your best Googling and finding out exactly how to do each task as well as finding out even more on the subject. Treat your website like a car and you need it to go faster, more you throw out the window the faster it should go - to a certain threshold.