French Car Forum - Hosting Problems

[xmexclusive]

Hi All

I have been watching Jims difficulties with keeping FCF alive and running while the service provider consistantly fails to deliver reliability.
Without Jims structured preplanning and time consuming routine Forum maintenance and back up they would have lost significant data from the site rather than the odd post each time it goes down. It seems that the help desk does not get told what the engineers are going to do to try to rectify things.
This is with a commercial service supplier selected carefully on good technical considerations and not the lowest price going.
So pleased that Jim is able and willing to put this effort in to keep a key source our cars technical information on line.
This episode reminds me that our own forum is similarly reliant on a single individual for all aspects of Forum delivery and maintenance.
Something that in the longer term we should perhaps review.
I had thought that before we got much bigger we should move our Forum to a commercial host.
Now I am not at all sure about making that change.

John

[andmcit]

It is frustrating to see it go down again: these days more times than a pair of tart's youknowwhats!
I imagine Jim must be shouting for somebody's blood now - very sad. What can you do to get a totally
stable host as it seems Jim has gone to great pains to do so?

Andrew

[Peter.N.]

I agree with the above, well done Jim for keeping it going!

Peter

[jonathan_dyane]

I hate to say I am terribly ignorant as to how these things work

Is it that you can host a forum on a PC used as a server at home (XM club), or alternatively outsource it to a specialist firm (FCF and BXC) or have I got the wrong end of the stick?

[xmexclusive]

Hi Jonathan

As I understand it Ciaran is running this Forum on a machine at home.
Just needs a dedicated computer set up to be a server that is always left on.
This type of specialist Forum will only attract a very small number of users at any one time.
So not likely to notice or detract from normal home internet use.
You are right that the alternative is to contract with a specialist firm to hire a server service from them.
Server companies have banks of servers connected to the internet using commercial high capacity connections.
I think Jim mentioned that the FCF specialist supplier has just moved it operation from UK based servers to German ones.

John

[andmcit]

Anyone seen it work this evening?

Andrew

[citroenxm]

Same here Andrew...

Ive 3 New post notifications, not been able to check them out yet...

Paul

[XMX]

FCF and BXC now up and running

[andmcit]

You beat me to it!!

Andrew

[XMX]

FCF and BXC now gone off line again (23:50 pm)
So I'm logging off my PC now, good night