Welcome Back! - Outage Explanation

If we make changes, if the boards will be down, or if we just want to let everyone know about something, we'll be posting it here.
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Diablo0
2GN.org Owner/Admin
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Welcome Back! - Outage Explanation

Post by Diablo0 » Mon Jan 26, 2009 10:12 pm

Hello Everyone! Welcome back to the site! :D

It's been quite the grueling week but we're back! :D I apologize for the delay but the site, or at least aspects of the date, going down was just as unexpected to me as it was to you. Let me get a few things straightened up and I'll type up an explanation of what all happened to cause this. :lol:

At any rate, welcome back to 2GN! :D In the next month we might have some down time here and there but hopefully nothing that will amount to much. It'll just be me tinkering with things making sure all us running smoothly. After this things should run quite a bit smoother from now on... I hope. :lol:
Last edited by Diablo0 on Tue Jan 27, 2009 7:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
-Jason
Black '02 Neon R/T | White '02 Neon R/T - SRT-4 Engine Swap
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^^^ no, that isn't what I look like haha
Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value. - Albert Einstein

User avatar
Diablo0
2GN.org Owner/Admin
Posts: 12576
Joined: Thu Apr 15, 2004 11:20 pm
Location: Greenville, SC
Contact:

Post by Diablo0 » Tue Jan 27, 2009 7:52 pm

Okay, I guess it's not too much to explain but here's what happened.

In short we outgrew the old host. Previously 2GN was hosted on a shared hosting plan. While it's great for most small sites since they don't get a huge amount of traffic and it's very cheap compared to a dedicated server, there are downfalls once the site starts to grow. On a shared hosting plan you share the server with what could be 100+ other websites. Thus the CPU, RAM, etc... are all shared between them all, even the IP of the server.

With 2GN growing steadily over the past several years it's getting more and more traffic. Every page view on the forum causes the server to query the database that the forum information is stored in. Things such as user info, posts, threads, and countless other items that appear when you view a page in the forum. Every one of those views uses resources on the server and on a shared hosting as mention above, those resources are shared with many other sites on the same server. The problem we ran into was that we were just using too much and possibly causing a slowdown for other sites on the server. For the host to fix this they had to do something and their solution was to disable what was causing most of it... viewtopic.php. They did that last Saturday which caused the Error 500 that everyone saw. They did the same thing the Saturday before that but I caught it in early in the morning by chance of waking up for whatever reason and was able to get them to re-enable it before most woke up. However they still noticed a high load mostly coming from that file and disabled it again until I could fix it. After talking to them over the course of 2-3 days to try and resolve the problem they just said I've outgrown the shared hosting plan and would need to upgrade to something better if there was nothing I could do to to reduce the CPU usage. And that's where we are...

I really didn't want to stick with the same host. I couldn't stand them as most of you probably know from previous problems I've had with them. So with that said if this is my forced opportunity to get away from them, I'm taking it since if I were to upgrade to a different hosting plan through the same host I'd still have to go through everything I just went through last week. I'm not doing all that work to just be stuck with the same customer service and possibly have problems again in the future.

From there it was on to bigger and better things for 2GN. :lol: Instead of a shared hosting plan we're now on a VPS plan which is a cross between shared hosting and a full dedicated server. The cost of running the site has gone up substantially (which I will discuss later) but we should be better off and not run into the same problems we had on the shared hosting plan (see outage explanation of 4/17/07). Other than that... I think other than a few little bugs here and there that from the move that I'll have to resolve as they appear, I think the site is working pretty well. *knocks on wood* lol

Again, welcome back everyone!
-Jason
Black '02 Neon R/T | White '02 Neon R/T - SRT-4 Engine Swap
Image
^^^ no, that isn't what I look like haha
Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value. - Albert Einstein

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