[theboltonfury]

Clearly, I like this website, so that's not the issue.

However, it is without question the most unreliable site of any site that I frequent. It seems to spend more time down compared to another by a country mile and I wonder why?

[Patfig]

theboltonfury, on 05 December 2011 - 12:07 PM, said:

Clearly, I like this website, so that's not the issue.

However, it is without question the most unreliable site of any site that I frequent. It seems to spend more time down compared to another by a country mile and I wonder why?

Are you still here

[GinAndPlatonic]

theboltonfury, on 05 December 2011 - 12:07 PM, said:

Clearly, I like this website, so that's not the issue.

However, it is without question the most unreliable site of any site that I frequent. It seems to spend more time down compared to another by a country mile and I wonder why?

The owners are saving to buy a house.....so it`s run on the cheap

[Gravity sucks]

Maybe if posts were limited to 9551 per member it would be better, shame that we would loose some posters with sagely insight. I'm just happy to have this site even if I have to put up with minor hiccups.

[theboltonfury]

doccyboy, on 05 December 2011 - 12:12 PM, said:

You can always go elsewhere if you are not happy with the site. No-one forces you to be here.

The servers were moved last week and there are teething problems till it settles in. Techies were working all day Sunday and today to try and remedy the problem.

Well, that;s all I was asking. I said in my first sentence that I was happy with the site.

I was just wondering why it was so up and down.Sorry for asking,

[theboltonfury]

Gravity sucks, on 05 December 2011 - 12:54 PM, said:

Maybe if posts were limited to 9551 per member it would be better, shame that we would loose some posters with sagely insight. I'm just happy to have this site even if I have to put up with minor hiccups.

Lose

[Gravity sucks]

Thank-you boltonfury. I needed correcting but I hope you got the gist. There is so much to worry/care about and on my scale of concerns a minor glitch doesen't get me going. I'm grateful to live in a world where such trivial things can keep you and me so unfocused. It's cold out there and we shoul be glad of sites like this that give light, support and even hope. Nothing personal because it frutrated me yesterday as well, but I just sucked it up and this morning my old friend was back.

[Charlie The Tramp Returns]

The problem is the Site and Forum is becoming so popular that upgrading it has become a regular thing. In the early days Webmaster was continually upgrading with loss of access on a regular basis as the site was moving faster than he could cope. Hence Fubra taking over with their high tech knowledge and it shows even they have to keep on the ball with greater speed.

[DTMark]

I have a lot of sympathy

I used to host a very popular site (some may remember - a long time back - Cliosport.net, I think) for them.

That regularly got to such vast numbers of people online that it monpolised the shared servers (web + sql) and was capped to prevent performance issues with other sites also hosted.

I worked with the owner, who was called Jason, I think (not our Jason I guess, would be a truly huge coincidence) and we recoded it, we did our best, but ultimately it needed dedicated boxes.

They got a dedicated box. Sorry to see them go, they were greast customers with a very busy forum. But nice to see them outgrow what they had and move up.

Sadly the (single, versus separate web/db) box fell over almost instantly under the load and I think they ended up with 2 servers as well just to be able to cope.

And of course much of the problem is that something that starts out as free for everyone, a labour of love, becomes a victim of its own succcess, because unless there's some money thrown at it, it doesn't get sorted.

And since nobody pays to use the site, I can well understand that it's quite hard to support the number of users and threads this thing has. I'm amazed that "MySql has gone away" or whatever it is that MySql tends to do when it's put under load (says the MS SQL Server developer, fnar fnar) doesn't seem to happen very often.

[Secure Tenant]

Charlie The Tramp Returns, on 06 December 2011 - 09:53 PM, said:

The problem is the Site and Forum is becoming so popular that upgrading it has become a regular thing. In the early days Webmaster was continually upgrading with loss of access on a regular basis as the site was moving faster than he could cope. Hence Fubra taking over with their high tech knowledge and it shows even they have to keep on the ball with greater speed.

Agreed on this and what DT Mark says. I'm just happy to have the site, and put up with its minor hiccups.

I've worked with a few of forum owners, who struggle to scale the server resources with the growth of their forums. Also the advertising money which pays for the servers can lag the growth too. If you could throw infinite money at the problem, but obviously HPC has to work to a budget like anything else.

You also have to combat spam, which on forums like this tends to be profile link blasts from spammers using xrumer etc.. (**cough**)

And a significant amount of resources can be used, coping with the scraping that goes, on not just spammers looking for "footprints" to spam, but scraping any blog/forum for usuable content.

Same with Wordpress hosted sites.. Found my home server continually blasted with agressive Russian (Yandex) and Chinese (Baidu) bots/spiders, which ignore .htaccess rules. Once you firewall off their huge IP ranges, the server load drops dramatically! Though with Wordpress you can statically cache the files, that wouldn't work with forum posting though.

Hosting in the days when you could offer a 10MB package for £50 or even £100 a year, and the hosted sites were mainly static html was money for old rope. Now with dynamic sites, even a quiet or abandoned forum or blog can be a significant resource hog.

This post has been edited by "Steed": 21 December 2011 - 09:05 AM