Server Upgrades

[xise]

It's making the site basically unusable for me today for the past 1-2 hours. I'm averaging 1 successful access per 7-8 attempts.

Anyone else having this problem?

[Eddie]

Yes--very annoying.

[Plenum]

[Brittany]

Same here. Can barely post anything.

[Eddie]

Steve this is downright ridiculous. We must do something about this.

[xise]

For quite a few days in the past month I've seen 60+ Guests online browsing the forums at a given time.

If these added guests are overloading the hosting server, perhaps it is time to move to a different hosting service?

[Plenum]

For quite a few days in the past month I've seen 60+ Guests online browsing the forums at a given time.

If these added guests are overloading the hosting server, perhaps it is time to move to a different hosting service?

money, money, money; xise.

I think a VPS is 400 bucks a year or so.

perhaps we can do a bring4th charity drive?

I will commit to 60bucks a year off the bat.

my word

[xise]

I'm willing to pay for spiritual stuff! Another $60 here

For quite a few days in the past month I've seen 60+ Guests online browsing the forums at a given time.

If these added guests are overloading the hosting server, perhaps it is time to move to a different hosting service?

money, money, money; xise.

I think a VPS is 400 bucks a year or so.

perhaps we can do a bring4th charity drive?

I will commit to 60bucks a year off the bat.

my word

[Hototo]

Willing to pay but require some amount of time to get finances in order.

While we're at it, how about we pay for a total redesign and add all the features and remove all the bugs that anyone has ever noticed and or wanted to add (features not bugs).

Hark ye and become telepathic. But really. We need this place for storage of thought in easy to read and access form for the next generations. This is not so much for our sake but for theirs. We be telepathic already ;D

[Bring4th_Steve]

Xise,

You are correct... Bring4th is experiencing growing pains! It brings both joy and frustration; joy for the fact that we continue to expand in use, but frustration during the times when we expect the site to provide service and it does not.

Most shared hosts allow only 25 concurrent processes. A process launches whenever someone clicks a link, loads a page, or does something that invokes the PHP language on our web host.

As Xise mentioned, when you have 50 concurrent people using the forum at one time, it's only a matter of time before 25 of those users click something on the Bring4th site at the same time, overloading our processing limit.

VPS is, indeed, our next step. A VPS host will allow us to determine our own amount of concurrent processes, which need to be balanced against the available memory and speed of the machine. In other words, the higher the concurrent users, the slower the site (generally speaking).

Right now I am trying to determine what our average load is. This will help us determine what level of VPS we should upgrade to. The second step is to pitch this to L/L Research and make the business case that the site hosting needs an upgrade.

Providing that L/L supports the decision to move ahead, we have another issue to deal with. Our host recently migrated Bring4th onto a beefier server. It happened to be that we started getting "Internal Server Errors" at the same time as this migration took place. What this suggests is that the server we were moved to is not configured properly, and the Apache Web Server is breaking by giving us the errors you see.

Up until this migration, we have not had any internal errors, which makes this situation VERY curious. Of course, the web host will not acknowledge that they are doing anything wrong, but it is a case I am trying to prove with them as we speak.

So you guys are now up to speed with the matter. I continue to bat tech support tickets back and forth with our web host in an attempt to resolve the performance issues. But if we're able to move to a VPS solution thanks to an affirmative decision by L/L, we may be able to resolve this issue in short order.

In the meantime, thank you for being patient. I'm trying to do a lot of administrative work on this server at the same time these errors are popping up, so no one is feeling the pain and struggle of working with this system more than me at this time, I bet! ;-)

Xise, I like the idea of rounding up a few folks who wish to sponsor part of the VPS expenses. That could possibly help L/L in its decision to know that it has some additional financial backing in this regard.

And for all of you who haven't figured it out... There are no traffic errors when you use the site at 1am-4am in the morning!! :-) ....jussssst kidding...

Steve

[Hototo]

Seeing as how this is close to my diary and or guidance system 101 log. I feel compelled to point out that the service provided exceeds above and beyond the cost of 50 euros. The magic this place has allowed me to manifest without blowing up everything else around me is far in excess of 50 euros worth.

But I'd rather not buy the server alone so I'll contribute what is the lowest common contribution if I have money at that point, which would be 60$ right now I believe.

[Bring4th_Steve]

Good news, everyone!

I spent last night drafting a report for L/L. Carla, Jim, and Gary have read it this morning, and they immediately approved the action of upgrading Bring4th to a VPS account. Great!!!

So any Internal Server Errors that you see are going to be short-lived. I am making it a priority to set up the new environment, which is going to be a little more of an investment of time, because unlike shared hosting, we are now responsible for setting up the entire server and all of its services, SSL, etc. We will have a good amount of tech support available to us, but it won't be as turn-key as signing up with a shared hosting plan.

It's very nice to see that interest is there to support L/L with the cost of the server upgrade. If anyone wishes to help with the expense of the servers, I strongly encourage using the store donation system. I am going to set up an entry in the store that will be exclusively towards the server costs. If anyone feels they have a couple of dollars to send to L/L on a regular basis (just a dollar or two per month from a group of us could really offset the added expense of a VPS account.)

As for expense, I priced out some hosts that have been given good reviews by its customers, yet are very efficient and economical. I found "myhosting.com" to be one of those services.

If anyone knows of a better provider, I ask for you to mention it here, so I can compare plans.

Since Bring4th needs to be moved ASAP, your prompt feedback would be appreciated.

I'll make an announcement on the main forum area so that people know an upgrade will be coming soon.

Thanks,
Steve

[xise]

Huzzah!!

[Hototo]

God I hope tis be as planned and as hoped.

[Horuseus]

It may be worthwhile to go with a Fully Managed VPS, removing the investment of time with the initial setup and debugging should an issue arise. WebHostingTalk is considered one of the main sites regarding Hosting reviews and testimonials so you may want to consider looking around the below. For what it's worth, they haven't been keen on MyHosting from what I have seen;

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=103

From a cursory glance WiredTree does seem to be the 'Go to' after Liquid Web which is regarded as the best Host (though it's prices are far from economical) for fully managed, reliable and great support.

https://www.wiredtree.com/managedvps/

KnownHost is another:

http://www.knownhost.com/managed-vps-packages.html

Regardless of which you go for, I can only see the need for expansion as a positive aspect, even if it may cause temporary hardship in the short term.

[Hototo]

I Agree it maybe best to migrate straight into a totally new system that just mimics that this "would suppose to do" without thinking of the code it has now at all and just optimizing around that. Dunno if thats possible but I think the code now might be really haphazard and put together really "kinda iffily". So My vote is on do a "expensive one now, maintain less later"

[βαθμιαίος]

It may be worthwhile to go with a Fully Managed VPS, removing the investment of time with the initial setup and debugging should an issue arise. WebHostingTalk is considered one of the main sites regarding Hosting reviews and testimonials so you may want to consider looking around the below. For what it's worth, they haven't been keen on MyHosting from what I have seen;

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/forumdisplay.php?f=103

From a cursory glance WiredTree does seem to be the 'Go to' after Liquid Web which is regarded as the best Host (though it's prices are far from economical) for fully managed, reliable and great support.

https://www.wiredtree.com/managedvps/

KnownHost is another:

http://www.knownhost.com/managed-vps-packages.html

Regardless of which you go for, I can only see the need for expansion as a positive aspect, even if it may cause temporary hardship in the short term.

If you don't want to go with fully managed, it may also make sense to check http://www.lowendbox.com/ and http://www.lowendtalk.com/ Some great deals are available, and I or others may be able to help with set up.

LEB top providers Q1 2013: http://www.lowendbox.com/blog/lowendbox-...1-results/

[Bring4th_Steve]

Fantastic! Thank you for the suggestions. I have a small window of time to look into each one before recommending a final decision.

Thankfully, I do have sys admin knowledge with Linux, so I'm not so concerned about the setup as I am with getting timely support should something go awry. Tobey, thanks a million for the option to request your help, I tucked that favor away in my vest, for now.

I do like the idea you put forth, Horuseus; to go for a service that offers a step above in end-user support. Each web host will always have its lovers and haters, so it's good to see some of the shadow side of MyHosting.com, since I clearly missed some important testimonials that would affect a final decision.

I'll let you guys know what I come up with.
Thanks again,
Steve

[Bring4th_Steve]

...I think the code now might be really haphazard and put together really "kinda iffily".

The code itself is not so much of a concern right now with our current host. It's the way our "upgraded" account has been configured. Either HostGator bait-and-switched our resource pool, causing resource issues, or they botched the Apache configuration files, causing connectivity issues.

If you are talking about the code that runs Bring4th, then please do not worry about that... The code for these forums and the rest of the site has been running fine since 2008. We'll be upgrading things soon, however. So that's when you want to be the most concerned about my programming skills.

Thanks for the feedback, NotSure!
Steve

[GentleReckoning]

Dunno how this compares, but when I was thinking about setting up a blog I looked at:
https://www.bluehost.com/

[Hototo]

Excellent, thank you.

Edit: I use Squarespace myself.

[Bring4th_Steve]

We are going to try KnownHost.com for managed VPS. They are extremely well-liked, as evidenced by the mountain of reviews and recommendations by professional system administrators. We got a lifetime discount on any server we upgrade to or downgrade from, which makes for a very economical upgrade. We'll also be moving llresearch.org to this same host, which will simplify administration as we enter into the next phase of upgrading the features of llresearch.org and bring4th.org.

Thanks for the referral to the Web Host Talk Forum, Horuseus. It was through that site that we got the lifetime discount, so many thanks for that!

Really excited about this host, and believe we'll be good with them for some time to come, if they are as good as their "sys admin fans" proclaim. :-)

I looked at the other hosts as well that were mentioned, but the solutions were either WAYYY out of our budget, or providing tiers of hardware that we are nowhere near needing at this time. KnownHost gave us the balance of economics vs. the quality of the hardware vs. resources offered for our package.

Lowendbox is a great site, Tobey! Definitely a gold mine for people looking to do unmanaged solutions, or at least solutions that are more hands-off than other managed solutions. For now, it appears we struck a good starting balance so that we have a hardened server with security controls, managed opcaches, monitoring of uptime, twice-daily backups, and other management features that I probably won't have time to deal with as I get underway with the site upgrades.

Thanks again, everyone. Looking forward to getting Bring4th moved over to the new host as soon as possible.
Steve

[Bring4th_Steve]

Well,

Bring4th has finally moved. It went smooth at first, and then we encountered some painful issues in pointing the DNS servers to the new host. This resulted in some downtime that Europe would have likely taken the brunt of, since it was early, early morning in the U.S.

Thankfully we got the DNS issues resolved, and I was able to make some final tweaks to the forum, store, chat, and other smaller areas to make sure the features worked as anticipated.

Please be extra aware at this time and let me know if you come across anything that is causing problems.

Also, please let me know if page times are faster or slower than you have been experiencing on the "old" Bring4th.

Thanks!
Steve

[xise]

Thank you Steve!!

[Parsons]

On my iPhone running on wifi, forum pages load noticeably faster.

---

Posting a reply is much faster.

[Spaced]

Seems to be going nice and fast. I have noticed one thing: if I click on the 'my dashboard' tab I don't see anything below the live traffic viewer.

---

Also my avatar seems to have stopped working, I guess I'll have to reup it when I get home

[Plenum]

good stuff Steve!

cheers

[Bring4th_Steve]

Thank you, Spaced... This is exactly the type of bug I'm looking for. Looks like it's hanging at the "chat room status" bar. It's doing it on the front page, too. I'll get that worked out.

Thanks!
Steve

Seems to be going nice and fast. I have noticed one thing: if I click on the 'my dashboard' tab I don't see anything below the live traffic viewer.

---

Also my avatar seems to have stopped working, I guess I'll have to reup it when I get home

[Hototo]

Clicking like seems to be about 2-5% quicker. Other than that what others have reported seems to apply to me as well in general at least.

[Plenum]

Hiya Steve,

the Law of One Forum, and its associated subform for the 'Archetypes' still seems to be locked, at least for me.

I get this message when I tried to reply to one of the thread's there or start a new thread:

You do not have permission to access this page. This could be because of one of the following reasons:
Your account has either been suspended or you have been banned from accessing this resource.
You do not have permission to access this page. Are you trying to access administrative pages or a resource that you shouldn't be? Check in the forum rules that you are allowed to perform this action.
Your account may still be awaiting activation or moderation. (Resend Activation Code)
You have accessed this page directly rather than using appropriate forms or link.

You are currently logged in with the username: 'plenum'

the other 'forums' seem to be ok.

cheers, plenum