Our Server Sucks

[Chaos he/him]

Sigh. That is all. Grrr

When has the site been inexplicably down for you? I know in the past ten minutes I got a 503 error... Grr

[Silus - Shard of Flame he/him]

I'll occasionally get an error, but either refreshing the page or going back and clicking the link again usually works.

[Emeralis00 she/her]

503 at about the same time as Chaos.

I was not amused...

[Chaos he/him]

503 at about the same time as Chaos.

I was not amused...

It was so annoying, and it lasted so long, too. I lost my reply to your Sentience topic from that.

[CrazyRioter she/her]

same here, and I've had a few incidents when the darn thing was down for hours.

[Chaos he/him]

same here, and I've had a few incidents when the darn thing was down for hours.

I was aware of one time for that, but it wouldn't surprise me that it happened other times.

It's a combination of our server sucking and our pretty high amount of users. We regularly get 4,000 uniques a month. Last month I think we got over 600,000 hits.

[Emeralis00 she/her]

It was so annoying, and it lasted so long, too. I lost my reply to your Sentience topic from that.

Lol

I was aware of one time for that, but it wouldn't surprise me that it happened other times.

It's a combination of our server sucking and our pretty high amount of users. We regularly get 4,000 uniques a month. Last month I think we got over 600,000 hits.

Trying to decide if this is good or bad...

[CrazyRioter she/her]

It's good. As long as we can get a better server that doesn't suck monkeys.

[Chaos he/him]

It's really good for a site that isn't that old. We're doing quite good.

Server money is dependent on Josh and Mi'chelle, and honestly, I'm scared to start moving stuff. But it is definitely on our radar.

[Emeralis00 she/her]

...start moving stuff. But it is definitely on our radar.

Uh, oh...

[Chaos he/him]

Don't worry, it would be seamless. But I'm just imagining that some small things would break.

I don't have very many specifics for you because I don't particularly want to stress over it

[Silus - Shard of Flame he/him]

Yeah, we might lose a box of old posts or something, but that happens in every move.

[Chaos he/him]

No we won't. I can say with certainty all forum data will be preserved. Otherwise, we aren't moving.

Have some faith, guys. The move to IPB software went cleanly This should go smoother than that.

[Emeralis00 she/her]

No we won't. I can say with certainty all forum data will be preserved. Otherwise, we aren't moving.

Have some faith, guys. The move to IPB software went cleanly This should go smoother than that.

Thats good. You had reminded me of the last forum that I was on. When it moved we lost a lot of stuff.

[Chaos he/him]

Thats good. You had reminded me of the last forum that I was on. When it moved we lost a lot of stuff.

That makes sense. But don't worry about it. If there is data, I keep it. You haven't seen my crazy file system. I have chat logs since 2003 archived.

We don't move until the data is secure. Until then, we deal with a crappy server

(For example, the Mistborn RP is still hosted by Invisionfree, because I have yet to be able to grab those databases. 17S is much more straightforward, since we own those databases.)

[Silus - Shard of Flame he/him]

No we won't. I can say with certainty all forum data will be preserved. Otherwise, we aren't moving.

Have some faith, guys. The move to IPB software went cleanly This should go smoother than that.

It was a moving joke. You know, like we're packing up the forum in a truck and taking it somewhere else?

[Chaos he/him]

Hey, I've been awake a while. Subtlety is lost on me at this point.

[Ryan he/him]

If we're voting, I have said before and will reiterate the opinion that we should move to steadfast.net. I've heard great things about them and I like the cut of their jib.

Also, you don't need to be nervous about migrating data. I've done it dozens of times. It's a fairly straightforward if tedious process. Just make sure you let me know when it's happening so I can help out.

Edit: crap, I just looked again and it looks like Steadfast got rid of their shared hosting plans and are now VPS only. Which, well, we may want. I didn't realize our traffic was so awesome. I'll have to do some more research in order to make good recommendations.

The problem we're going to run into is budgetary, of course. Cheap hosting plans with ridiculously high usage caps tend to suck. It's funny, but a cheap plan with reasonable usage caps almost always offers a vastly higher quality of service than does a same-priced plan with essentially unlimited usage.

Take MediaLayer for example. Their cheapest plan costs $10/mo. and offers 10GB/mo. of transfer and 500MB of storage space. I've got a site hosted there, on that plan, and the servers are rock-solid, extremely fast, with excellent support. Contrast that to our current plan, which costs less per month, has usage caps so high as to be indistinguishable from unlimited, and has, to quote Strong Bad, crap for brains.

My personal site is hosted on Nearly Free Speech. It is a pay-as-you-go host. You literally only pay for the bandwidth, storage, and other server resources you use, and nothing more. The service has been very reliable, and while the speed didn't used to be that great, it has made great leaps in the past year. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them for our site.

I'll need to do more research, and hope that we haven't gotten so big as to be unable to afford a quality hosting plan that fits our needs.

[Joe ST he/him]

NearlyFreeSpeech is where I host too. I don't know if it is worthy of big sites, but it works for me.

[Chaos he/him]

Yeah, I remember when I made this topic that I dug through your tweets to find steadfast.net That may be a bit too advanced (or expensive) for our needs but I guess we will see. I need to talk with Josh, Mi'ch, and the other admins about it. My personal opinion is that we need to pay what we need to to provide awesome services for the fans. (Maybe we just need a donate bar XD)

I'm checking our bandwidth usage and in March we did 10GB of bandwidth. Apparently in October we did 15GB of bandwidth, but I guess that makes sense because of the interview going up. So at least from that perspective, steadfast's VPS seems like a better deal. I don't know how much memory or whatever we use now. I just checked cpanel and it said Disk /dev/sda8 (/home) is at 83% with a little warning symbol, so clearly we are using our server's capabilities up (at least, at the time I'm checking it now, this is the case).

We definitely need to discuss more with everyone about where we should go from here. If we have more media, like our eventual ShardCast, I think we will need significantly more bandwidth than 10GB of medialayer. Though I really like what medialayer is offering. VPS may be the best bet.

[Ryan he/him]

I'm not sure what you're talking about WRT the disk space. I just checked, and we're using a bit over 500 MB. I doubt we'll need more than a few gigs long-term.

Also, checking our usage, we could fit just fine on MediaLayer's basic plan, with the odd overage on unusually busy months (which overages are billed very reasonably).

[Chaos he/him]

I'm not sure what you're talking about WRT the disk space. I just checked, and we're using a bit over 500 MB. I doubt we'll need more than a few gigs long-term.

Also, checking our usage, we could fit just fine on MediaLayer's basic plan, with the odd overage on unusually busy months (which overages are billed very reasonably).

I'm not even sure what I'm talking about with the disk space. I just checked Cpanel on the bottom left--there's a link to specific usage and apparently that one was being weird. I'm just as confused as you.

I would think that our bandwidth would only go up with time, and since MediaLayer's second tier plan is the same price as Steadfast's second plan, it may be smarter to go with Steadfast. And with ShardCast I'm sure our usage would be >10GB regularly. Stupid media taking up space!