BTW - I have a suspicion that hosts are the ones hacking each otehr - humans heh - can’t see teh boogers on tehir nose for the dirt in their eyes
The sad thing is that most hosts actually suck. The small company where I’m working at depends on a farm of 10-15 servers for millions in revenus (not profit alas) every year. Last week there’s a guy at the host company in New York that tripped over a cable, trying to do something on our server (which had not even been authorised by our boss), which shut everything down for more than an hour. This is very, very bad. All hosts suck, there’s only hosts that suck less than others.
Does anyone here have any experience with theplanet.com as a hosting service?
I’d agree with this, a virtual server would probably be the best fit for the number of users this site gets.
Having said that I don’t think you should be seeing these problems for a PHP bulletin board on a shared server. More resources always helps but there’s something in me that says it’s not the resources thats the problem. Without knowing the precise error that’s being thrown it’s hard to diagnose. Somewhere in the background there will be a very precise error statement that could be anything, the only reason we’re getting “internal server error” is because there’s no error handling page configured.
I’d check the phpBB config and the apache config. I’d even try a clean install of phpBB before throwing more money at the issue.
I have used 1and1.com for a long time. They are huge but I have had no experience using them with a site with this much SQL traffic. But they are big and cheap and big and may work for this site. The other big one that has a stellar reputation and offers grid, virtual and dedicated stuff is Media Temple at http://mediatemple.net/. I have not used them but people always seem really happy with their service and a lot of sites I respect use their service. They are also known for very good customer support. 1and1 does fine with customer support but is your typical off-shored go by the book kind of thing.
Just a few thoughts.
Just jumping in with a quick update here. Dale and I have been in touch to figure out what to do next, it’s mostly just that whole Bad Time Of Year thing.
What’s going on at Dreamhost, as best as I can tell, is the combination of several things: a shared MySQL configuration that’s not doing the site any favours (especially given phpBB’s search implementation), which leads to processes running too long and getting killed, which leads to the internal server errors.
There’s really no big mystery as to why it’s doing poorly – Dreamhost isn’t designed for sites of this magnitude, which is why I moved from my Dreamhost account to Linode in the first place. Moving back here was a combination of several things: Dale already having stuff hosted here, and hopes that the move to phpBB 3 and to a different cluster at Dreamhost would settle things down. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to have done so.
The trick now is to find a managed hosting provider that’s the right size for the forums, so Dale can work with them directly to make things run well, instead of just having them tell him that it’s running poorly!
In the meantime I’m not sure there’s a lot that can be done, but we’ll try. Thanks for your patience.
I’ve not had any trouble this evening at all. Has the problem been fixed, or am I the only one on-line tonight?
djm
not quite the only one
it is behaving well right now
Yep, seems to be working fine for me too.
It looks like the server move to Dreamhost VPS (Virtual Private Server) finally took place late this afternoon. Hopefully, this will keep things going for a while. A nice little Christmas present.
Meanwhile, a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!
Good work guys, thanks for the effort and all. Makes me realize Chiff is one of my favorite to visit every day.
This is the first time in 4 days I’ve been able to log in and get on the board…
MERRY CHRISTMAS to ALL!!!
Jingly Things!
djm
Seems much more responsive, today. Thanks for all your hard work.
ahhh - “yes Virginia, there really is a Santa Claus!”
Glad it’s working again - Thanks Dale & Rich & everyone.
Merry (season of your choice) Everyone!
Best,
Deisman
It’s good to see the site back online. I was sad when I couldn’t get the site. ( I may have sworn a little bit at the time. Santa gave me a potato for that. Coal’s too expensive. ) Thanks for all the hard work, guys, especially at Christmastime. Have you thought about solving your problems by purchasing a small moon and – okay maybe not.
Merry Ho-ho;
Mark
You’re back!
Thanks so much!
We missed you!
Ro and Lesley
we’re back- thanks everyone
woot!
Now all we need is the bubble wrap!!!