[Fury]

We've had a flood of technical difficulties today and our host has been contacted about these problems.

[Fury]

As you are most likely aware by now, technical problems were not limited to just one day. To our grave disappointment our host has not contacted us back of these problems. By now we are sure that the problems are not caused by our software setup and must be a problem with either the superserver or the virtual server we are hosted on, either way fixing the problem seems to be out of our reach.

Luckily the major problems were limited to just a few days, but we still had numerous outages all week each lasting approximately five minutes. Not only that, but apparently these problems have been present in a smaller scale at least a month if not longer.

Having technical difficulties is one thing, but ignoring their paying customers is unacceptable. Rest assured however, we are evaluating the situation very carefully and you will hear more from us later this week.

[CP5670]

The site has started going down again. There were two or three brief periods today where I couldn't access it (the last one was a few minutes ago). You guys may want to consider changing hosts if this keeps up.

[Fury]

It is pretty much set to stone that we'll move since the hosting company decided to completely ignore our problem reports, and we sent three of them. Unfortunately selecting a hosting company and hosting plan is not easy.

The biggest problem is money. I haven't checked lately but at some point average monthly revenue from ads was somewhere $55. Don't fall for overadvertised shared hosting plans such as DreamHost. Even low-end virtual dedicated servers don't have the CPU/RAM, bandwidth or hard drive space HLP needs. Mid-highrange virtual dedicated servers usually have enough resources and low-midrange dedicated servers certainly have. But we cannot afford a server with enough resources for growth with just $55. Good hosting company, good service, good support and good server costs $100-200 per month.

[vyper]

Whats HLPs monthly bandwidth usage?

[Fury]

200GB bandwidth to be safe and this is not counting http://downloads.hard-light.net. Hard drive space taken by HLP is 30GB to be safe. This is after we asked all hosted projects to remove unnecessary stuff. Note that a server needs two hard drives in either RAID1 configuration or without RAID but with a scheduled file copy to secondary hard drive. This is only reliable way to prevent data loss should one of the hard drives fail. CPU/RAM wise a server that can handle gzip compression of a 1GB database without noticeable slowdown would be much preferred.

However, none of this has taken into account how much we need in 1, 2 or 3 years. Instead of a short-term solution by going with these safe values, a long-term solution would be much preferred. For a long-term solution the safe values should be doubled.

In fact, I'd have an ideal solution for HLP's next server that could handle even the most ambitious plans of the admins into foreseeable future. (And let me tell you, we have ambitious plans...) But that would require 174 community members (including admins) to donate $10 once a year for the new server. Or 240 community members if you want to get rid of the advertisements. Reasonable? You (the community) decide.

[vyper]

Until I know what these ambitious plans are, I can't possibly comment.

[Mefustae]

Okay, now i'm getting error messages whenever I try to make a post. It makes the damn post, but gives me the error screen instead of taking me back to the thread. More problems on the horizon, o-great admins?

[Fury]

Again? "Can't create/write to file" error fixed, for now. If this error pops up again, post here so we'll know of it sooner.

[Dark Hunter]

I occaisionally get a "database error" after I post. The site records my post, but it doens't take me there. I also got it when attempting to view Unread Topics.

It said to report it to admins, so here I am: reporting it.

[Fury]

Yeah, it's the same cause as "Can't create/write to file" reported above. When it occurs, post here and it will be fixed. Unfortunately the fix is only temporary as it is likely caused by those ~5min outages happening every now and then.

[Mefustae]

Looks like it's back. Have you any idea what specifically causes those '~5-minute outages' every now and then, or is it just the cheap server we have?

[Fury]

Since the host has so far ignored our emails of these problems, we don't have a clue what's causing the problem. We are fairly certain it's not a problem we can solve. Skippy, as good as he is with linux servers is as lost as I am.

[Scuddie]

Just out of curiosity, what is the hosting company, and what are the specs of the box?

[vyper]

Question  - how many stats are being recorded by the server? Might be heavy CPU load thats causing the outages.

[Fury]

Just out of curiosity, what is the hosting company, and what are the specs of the box?

Servelocity. Virtual server being served on a dual 3.2GHz Xeon with dynamically allocated RAM up to 4GB. Specs are fine but there is something screwy going on with resource allocation.

Question  - how many stats are being recorded by the server? Might be heavy CPU load thats causing the outages.

It is a resource allocation problem, not CPU usage but RAM. When these outages happens, there's not enough RAM to even execute as simple command as netstat. It takes about five minutes for the server to recover, sometimes even longer. The funny thing is that not even rebooting the virtual server helps or the problem is back in five minutes after a reboot. The problem disappears on its own and comes back later.

[Scuddie]

I dont know what Servelocity does exactly, but I do know that virtual servers with dynamic load balancing suck major ass.  I would recommend ThePlanet's servermatrix division if you decide to go pure dedicated.  It aint cheap (starting 119.00 up to 260.00), but it has customer support second to none.  I've been working with ThePlanet on several occasions, and they're well worth it.

Although I dont know if this is neccessary for HLPs needs.  Just giving my recommendation if you go down that road .

EDIT:  THIS GOD DAMN THING IS GETTING OUT OF HAND!!  It took 5 minutes just to hit the edit button!!

[Fury]

Yes I would prefer a dedicated server as well. But we can't afford a good one without donations. At this time Sandwich is the one who handles financial matters and with the whole Israel conflict going on, I don't know when he can set up a page and donation system. But even then, would the community donate enough to afford a good dedicated server from a good hosting company? Can't find out without setting up donations first though I guess.

[Xelion]

HLP takes up 30GB , why? A good dedicated server is gonna cost US$300+ month, especially all the things your wanting it for.

I'm with MDWebHosting, though I haven't really tested my hosts capabilities yet. MediaTemple is a pretty good host from what I've heard, but they are really pricey.

[Shade]

Several years worth of forum posts, models/textures/animations/promo videos for every hosted project, the wiki, site art (well, not so much anymore)... it adds up. 30GB is not a lot for a site like this.