Growth is a very tough thing to manage. Many of you may not have noticed, but we actually began having problems last November. What has happened is the combination of two things, one, the hosting service we selected for the forums, ValueWeb, did something unexpected to us, they have a very stringent "CPU" usage percentage on our specific hosting plan, so even though we only use 50% of out bandwidth allotment, and only 5% of out disc drive allotment, we demand a higher % of total CPU time than we are "allowed".
Two, as people have become familiar with the new format, they are using it's many advanced features more (Avatar, searches, etc.). These put an even higher load on the CPU.
Something else happened at ValueWeb to make the problem worse, but many phone calls have not helped figure it out. They keep blaming the program, but we have not changed anything, same code as before, so we feel the program is not the problem...... more than likely, they put another heavy user on the same server, so the scarce CPU time, became even scarcer!
After many excruciating phone calls with ValueWeb late last year, no good alternative could be found with them, all required us to move the site to a different server within there hosting, and none guaranteed we would not have similar problems at greatly increased expense.
First thing we did was to offload all we could from the ValueWeb server, this included Chat and the advertising server, we also did a few things to the code to decrease CPU load.
Next we started looking at dedicated server and colocated server options, both the only way to assure we would get 100% of a servers CPU time. After much hand-wringing, and a lot of proposals, we decided to make the plunge, buy a server, and colocate it. It took a while to specify the server and get funds approved. The new server arrived last Thursday, was set up Saturday, and actually went on-line today. You may have noticed how fast the ads pop up now..... well they are being served from the new server....what is really interesting is how they pop up FASTER than the UBB pages, which are being called locally. The new
Classifieds are loaded on the new server, as is the new
Events Calendar , notice how fast these are......
It will take a LOT OF WORK to move the UBB to the new server, but once done, the "Service Temporarily Unavailable" should be history. If it's not, we can add a second CPU and more memory to the server as it is very scalable. We do not have an ETA for the move yet, but we will let everyone know when it will occur, as there will be some downtime when it happens.
Why did we choose ValueWeb? We went to them after trying several alternative in the UBB testing phase, they had all we needed and a 99.9% uptime guaranty at a price we could afford, what we did not understand was 99.9% uptime did not mean 99.9% availability. Our mistake. When we move to the new server, we expect it to be much faster, but the downside, is we could have an occasional period of downtime because it IS our server, and if something goes wrong, it will need to be fixed. That is the tradeoff.
Hope this helps clear things up, there is MUCH that happens "underneath" the site that only a handful ever see, as it should be, all the users should see is a site that works!
