Hi,
I just wanted to quickly give an update on the recent server outage on bfi.org. Our site went down at approximately 10am EST yesterday (8-22-2006) and stayed down until about noon today (8-23-2006). The site went down rather abruptly yesterday when i was trying to update a posting. After waiting for about 5 hours I finally heard back from our ever so responsive hosting provider (site5.com) informing me that there is some kind of a problem with too many database connections being opened at the same time (the maximum that they allow is 15). I was advised to log-in with ssh access and clear out the connections. Well, it turns out that I couldn't access the database configurations using the type of remote access that they provide and waited another 3 hours until someone realized this. After having the login-shell changed I was still not able to access the database configuration. So I basically had to wait until someone on site5's end would take care of this, which turned out to be approximately 20 hours later. At this point I am looking into other hosting providers as this level of service certainly is nowhere near adequate for our site. I will keep everybody posted on what will happen in the future, but it looks like migrating to a more reliable and responsive provider would be a huge benefit.
Please feel free to comment on this posting if you have any suggestions for reliable hosting providers.
Best
- Jochen
Hi All,
I just wanted to mention that I have opened a VPS hosting account with another company that will be able to allow us to deliver content from the site much faster since it gives us a higher bandwidth and more concurrent database connections. I am looking to transfer the site over to our new account within the next few days. Ideally this should be completely transparent to you, our users and will hopefully result in a much faster and more stable site.
Best,
- Jochen
--Site Administrator--
jh@bfi.org
Hi All,
As you may have noticed our website was down again for a long time yesterday and partially today. Again, our hosting provider was claiming that some database script was malfunctioning but as I hadn't made any changes to the site, this seemed somewhat unlikely. I have managed to get the site back up and running and have also upgraded the codebase to a more recent version. The downtime could have potentially been caused by a bot that was flooding the database with requests. As a result I have temporarily disabled all bots from accessing the site. In addition I am going to review the access logs and see where the flooding (if any) could have originated from.
As you will notice, some of the features of the site, mainly the javascript menu and some of the verbiage and options that show up after posting something to the forums have temporarily been disabled. I am currently working on transitioning this site to a different server which will allow us to have better performance overall.
Will keep everybody posted on any other changes/developments
Best and sorry for any inconveniences that the downtime might have caused
- Jochen
--Site Administrator--
jh@bfi.org