Hosting widgets on shared account?

[MaggieScratch]

I've had an idea for a widget that I'd like to host on my shared account that reloads a bit of text (quotations) every 15 minutes or so from a database on my server. Would that be allowed on a shared account? I'm not using even close to all my bandwidth at the moment, but I'm concerned that having a widget refresh every 15 minutes or so might cause an overload on the server.

[the_ancient]

it really depends on how the query is formatted, how large the database is, and how many users use your widget.

[MaggieScratch]

So I guess the answer is that it's okay to try it out?

I have a decent reader base but not huge by any stretch.

[JPC-Masood]

So I guess the answer is that it's okay to try it out?

Yes, please go ahead and let us know how it goes.

[MaggieScratch]

Cool, thanks, Masood. We might not be set up for another week or so. I'll keep an eye on the bandwidth.

[jason]

Would your site be able to handle someone hitting reload every 15 minutes? Most likely it would. Data feeds (such as the one you'd use here) are usually quite small, compared to most web pages--first they generally don't include any images and they are usually smaller than a typical web page because they only have content and no extra data such as navigation and style markup.

If you are concerned that rebuilding a feed from a database repeatedly would use too many server resources (again, not likely unless you are getting tons of hits) you could build a static file and update it only when you update the quotations or use a cron job to update it at a regular interval (like every 15 minutes).

--Jason