The recent Website outage

[limetech]

The only explanation I have received from my hosting provider is:

 

... it was suspended due to "causing too many external connections"

 

I have no idea WTF that means & I have received no further explanation.  There was no warning and nowhere in the hosting agreement does it mention any such limitation.

 

So... as soon as 5.0-beta is released I will be looking (again) for a new hosting service.  Anyone have any experience with linode?

 

Speaking of 5.0 - beta1 is almost ready.

 

 

[speeding_ant]

Look forward to using 5! How much are you paying at the moment for hosting?

[bubbaQ]

I've heard of similar language when the culprit is php making external connections for some wiki or forum stuff.... particularly addins that are hosted elsewhere.

[kizer]

There are a few settings in SMF that could cause issues.

 

In SMF do you have the box checked to "Use a persistent Connection" which would speed up the forum, but at the sametime would kill the server.

 

and you could turn off Hostname Lookups so it doesn't constantly look for the users hostname

 

Other than that users with Avatars the server is polling that address to display the images, but not knowing exactly what they are complaining about it makes it really difficult to even begin.

[DoeBoye]

I have no experience with Linode, but if you're looking for other recommendations, I have been with http://httpme.com/ for the last 5 years or so and can't say enough good things about them!

 

[WeeboTech]

and I thought you were moving the site.

 

BubbaQ mentioned that other sites served by this company were having issues too.

 

I would surmise that an insecure script may have allowed someone to utilize the hosts servers.

 

My friend and I used to see this all the time.

We wrote a number of nagios plugins to monitor and handle this situation.

[sdballer]

hostmonster.com is great, I have many high traffic websites.

[330T]

I've had great success with hostgator.com

 

[BRiT]

I've had positive experiences with ThePlanet while running several websites and forums.

[ysss]

Is the @lime-technology.com email server also down?

I've tried sending email to tomm and support, but they seem to bounce...

 

My USB drive died. I'm wondering if there's any trick to reviving these or not? I mean, it's not due to its value, just out of convenience (and that my latest copy of /config is a few months old).

[NAS]

Instant server from Leaseweb.

 

Dedicated server all the way. Best 400 Euro PA you will ever spend and tax free since your outside the EU.

[aiden]

I use dreamhost.com.  Very responsive, very easy to configure and use, unlimited bandwidth and storage, and $10 / month.

[omkar]

I also agree with the dreamhost.com recommendation.  I've used various hosts over the last 13 years and found myself switching every few years out of frustration.  I've been with Dreamhost for the last 5 or so and can't imagine going anywhere else.  There is an incredible amount of flexibility that they offer - their custom panel is a great asset.  There are occasional outages though.

 

Here's my uptime as reported by Pingdom:

Jan 2010 - 99.85%

Feb 2010 - 99.87%

Mar 2010 - 99.05%

Apr 2010 - 99.81%

May 2010 - 99.83%

June 2010 - 99.85%

 

I have a Private Server through them which allows me to adjust the resources of the server on the fly.  I believe the Private Servers are more stable than their shared hosting.  I also get a response via email fairly quickly when I file a Support Ticket and I *think* they give more priority to Private Server accounts.  It isn't terribly expensive either.  I'd venture to guess that your costs for a Private Server with Dreamhost would be about $45/month.  If you want to compare your traffic to mine, send me a PM and I'd be happy to share.  I am not affiliated with Dreamhost in any way, other than being a satisfied customer (of both Dreamhost and Limetech  ).

[NAS]

...

 

I have a Private Server through them which allows me to adjust the resources of the server on the fly....

 

Can you expand on this feature? Perhaps you mean VIRTUAL private server?

[leez0rs]

theplanet

[limetech]

Everything seems to be working again.  Once the site was back up, email worked for about 2 hours, then all incoming email started bouncing.  This was finally fixed sometime this morning and I have been busy getting caught up with email correspondence.

 

So the excuse 'dotable' is giving is that I had "too many connections to the server", and as a result the account was suspended.  However I think this is B.S.

 

I had been running maybe a year with two accounts: one for the main 'lime-technology.com' domain, the other for a download repository.  Then last February, I kept hitting 'bandwidth limitation' on the download account, so I created a new download account with a dedicated IP address at another host provider.  I then requested 'dotable' to cancel the original download account (but of course keep the main domain account).

 

Well it seems on 12 July they finally got around to removing the old download account, but what I think happened is they either 'deleted' or 'suspended' BOTH accounts by mistake.  This is because in my first correspondence with their tech support, they said the account was 'removed upon request'.  It wasn't until several email exchanges later they came up with the explanation, "oh your account got suspended due to too many connections".  What I think they actually did was either restore my account from a backup, or "undid" the work of deleting the account, and the 'too many connections' was a CYA excuse.

 

Anyway... version 5.0-beta1 is about done & then at some point I will migrate the whole shebang to a VPS.

[WeeboTech]

What I think they actually did was either restore my account from a backup, or "undid" the work of deleting the account, and the 'too many connections' was a CYA excuse.

 

Agree with you!  It was odd I was seeing some message thread subscription notifications for messages I already read. Then on other message links I had in my email folder it would say the messages didn't exist.

 

Great news on 5.0b1 woo hoo. This should be exciting!

[omkar]

...

 

I have a Private Server through them which allows me to adjust the resources of the server on the fly....

 

Can you expand on this feature? Perhaps you mean VIRTUAL private server?

 

Yes, it is a Virtual Private Server:

http://www.dreamhost.com/hosting-vps.html

 

My understanding is that there are multiple (virtual) private servers on a physical machine.  But you can designate the amount of resources to dedicate to your virtual private server and those resources are not shared with anyone else.

[dgallaher]

I can't imagine your bandwidth usage is all that high, but you could always use something like CoralCDN or CoBlitz to distribute the load.

[WeeboTech]

I can't imagine your bandwidth usage is all that high, but you could always use something like CoralCDN or CoBlitz to distribute the load.

 

I bet you would be surprised at the forum traffic.

All you need is one spam crawler to find you and your bandwidth shoots up as it reads every message and automatically tries posting spam.

 

My blog has not had updates for ages and I still get huge amounts of traffic on my site.

[vca]

...

 

Anyway... version 5.0-beta1 is about done & then at some point I will migrate the whole shebang to a VPS.

 

If you are going the VPS route my personal recommendation is for www.linode.com, I've had a VPS on their servers for about 2.5 years and found their service to be very stable and well run.  They have a good range of server sizes so you can start small and grow pretty easily.

 

Regards,

 

Stephen

[JetShred]

I absolutely love Linode!