French Car Forum - Hosting Problems

General information about upcoming maintenance, and other events which affect the forum.
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xac
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Joined: Sat Jan 23, 2010 6:31 pm

Re: French Car Forum - Hosting Problems

Post by xac » Sat Jan 23, 2010 7:11 pm

I've had similar problems with hosting companies in the past.
The first forum I ran for an online game was hosted in the US, reasonably priced, and in two years maybe only one or two outages.
So when I needed to host another forum, I went with them. Big mistake. The service level dropped, I was being fobbed off, loads of outages (basically one customer on the server had a runaway process which would cause the server to restart all websites to prevent itself actually crashing) and they refused to move me to another server. Then the original forum started having problems, I'd handed control of that site to someone else so wasn't my problem, but it was becoming obvious they were hosting too many sites on each server.
I moved the forum to another company in the UK, had 6 months with them being very helpful and no unplanned outages (they'd give plenty of notice of maintenance, and a problem log keeping everyone updated of any issues).
Then they upgraded to PHP5, which screwed the forum up. They were good at helping me fix a lot of the code which was PHP4 specific, but there were database timeouts. The MySQL server was over subscribed and often took too long to respond to page requests.
Again I was fobbed off, something wrong with my code, so I hosted the database on my server at home.
Everyone on the forum reported an increase in response times, the forum was flying! Best of all, no more error messages.
So I informed the hosting company, asked them to increase the php timeout setting, they refused saying the current setting was company policy and they would under no circumstances change it. I discovered I wasn't alone in having problems.
So I moved the web site to my home server and told the hosting company where to shove it.
I'm on O2 broadband so have 1Mbps upstream which is plenty for hosting a website (most hosting companies have 1 or 2 Mbps shared across all their customers).
Cassy - 1.9TD Xantia Estate SX
Jenny - 1.9TD Xantia SX
Juliet - 2.0CT Xantia Activa

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Dean
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Re: French Car Forum - Hosting Problems

Post by Dean » Sat Jan 23, 2010 7:15 pm

Hi Xac, good to have you with us, you know when your reading something and it goes right over your head................................... :D

D
92 Citroen XM Prestige 3.0i Auto R.P5678
14 Mitsubishi L200 Trojan
89 Talbot Express 2.0 coach built Auto-trail Chinook

Addicted to Crackanory

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xac
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Joined: Sat Jan 23, 2010 6:31 pm

Re: French Car Forum - Hosting Problems

Post by xac » Sat Jan 23, 2010 7:27 pm

I've been lurking since the FCF started having problems :)

What bits are going over your head? You know I love explaining things :)
Cassy - 1.9TD Xantia Estate SX
Jenny - 1.9TD Xantia SX
Juliet - 2.0CT Xantia Activa

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Dean
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Location: Isle of wight

Re: French Car Forum - Hosting Problems

Post by Dean » Sat Jan 23, 2010 7:39 pm

I think most are lurking still.
You lost me at the beggining of this bit
I've had similar problems with hosting companies in the past.
The first forum I ran for an online game was hosted in the US, reasonably priced, and in two years maybe only one or two outages.
So when I needed to host another forum, I went with them. Big mistake. The service level dropped, I was being fobbed off, loads of outages (basically one customer on the server had a runaway process which would cause the server to restart all websites to prevent itself actually crashing) and they refused to move me to another server. Then the original forum started having problems, I'd handed control of that site to someone else so wasn't my problem, but it was becoming obvious they were hosting too many sites on each server.
I moved the forum to another company in the UK, had 6 months with them being very helpful and no unplanned outages (they'd give plenty of notice of maintenance, and a problem log keeping everyone updated of any issues).
Then they upgraded to PHP5, which screwed the forum up. They were good at helping me fix a lot of the code which was PHP4 specific, but there were database timeouts. The MySQL server was over subscribed and often took too long to respond to page requests.
Again I was fobbed off, something wrong with my code, so I hosted the database on my server at home.
Everyone on the forum reported an increase in response times, the forum was flying! Best of all, no more error messages.
So I informed the hosting company, asked them to increase the php timeout setting, they refused saying the current setting was company policy and they would under no circumstances change it. I discovered I wasn't alone in having problems.
So I moved the web site to my home server and told the hosting company where to shove it.
I'm on O2 broadband so have 1Mbps upstream which is plenty for hosting a website (most hosting companies have 1 or 2 Mbps shared across all their customers).


:)

an explanation would be a waste of time Xac, i can turn a computer on, and i can turn it off, everything successful that happens between those two events is either blind luck or an accident.

D
92 Citroen XM Prestige 3.0i Auto R.P5678
14 Mitsubishi L200 Trojan
89 Talbot Express 2.0 coach built Auto-trail Chinook

Addicted to Crackanory

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xac
XM newbie
Posts: 5
Joined: Sat Jan 23, 2010 6:31 pm

Re: French Car Forum - Hosting Problems

Post by xac » Sat Jan 23, 2010 8:11 pm

Dean wrote:an explanation would be a waste of time Xac, i can turn a computer on, and i can turn it off, everything successful that happens between those two events is either blind luck or an accident.

D
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Cassy - 1.9TD Xantia Estate SX
Jenny - 1.9TD Xantia SX
Juliet - 2.0CT Xantia Activa

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CitroJim
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Re: French Car Forum - Hosting Problems

Post by CitroJim » Sun Jan 24, 2010 8:20 am

Dean wrote: an explanation would be a waste of time Xac, i can turn a computer on, and i can turn it off, everything successful that happens between those two events is either blind luck or an accident.
D
Even us IT professionals feel like that Dean :lol: You are not alone...

Xac, good to know we're not alone then. To be honest it seems to me that nearly all the hosting companies at the lower end of the price range are a bit suspect. The Service Desk at Webfusion is not ITIL compliant and their staff not the most helpful. It seems to me that they are flailing around somewhat with their isses.

I've got a temporary (emergency) server running at home so that a holding message informing visitors of the situation with the FCF and BXC can be hosted. I have also brought www.eastment.net and www.xantiav6.co.uk up on my server. The latter has the XantiaV6 Forum running and on there I have created an "Emergency BXC and FCF Forum" and a Global Announcement to tell in some reasonable detail the current state of play.

My email is also working again so feel free to email me at the address you can find in my profile.

Feel free to register on the XantiaV6 forum. Activation is currently set to admin approval at the moment as I have not got the GD Captcha running properly yet. I warn you that the forum will not be speedy. Hopefully it will be reliable though!!!

I'll be on here on regular occasions and will keep these threads up to date with news as it happens..

Xac, grateful for a technical natter with you at some point on this...

Can anyone recommend good webhosting at a reasonable cost please as I'm debating staying with Webfusion..

Thanks as always for your patience and a huge thanks to Ciaran for the use of Club-XM during these difficult times.
Jim

'98 Saxo
'95 AX
Three bikes - Road, Aero and TT

Ex- owner of several XMs and many Xantias!

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