The web site still takes a long time to load and post. It times out quite often. It's about 50-50 on when it behaves at a "normal" speed, like other web sites, or goes in to a waiting-for-something to happen mode.

Not to complain, just saying that something is not quite right. Maybe it's just me and my Mozilla Firefox web-browser, with some Spam and pop-up blockers?

It's faster when it works, but it still times out. Last night I had to give up when trying to upload a post. I had been trying for an hour and just wanted to go to bed. I emailed the post to myself and then posted it just now to the forum.

I don't know the particulars of your hosting, but is it possible that you're experiencing "throttling?" Some hosts will impose bandwidth restrictions and even time outs when bandwidth exceeds a certain mark.

I have a good friend in IT who has handled all of my hosting since 1997. (I do a lot of web design work.) She has a small UNIX box under management and her own T1. It's under-utilized at the moment. Over the entire time she's hosted for me (almost 15 years), I've never had slow service. There were a few times (literally 3?) where I had an outage for a few hours, due to some technical glitch. My various clients have been very happy with the hosting I subcontract to her.

Anyway, I think she's looking for more clients at this time. If you'd like, I can put you in touch with her. Just PM me.

Try opening a new tab in your browser and going to the site. It seems to kick start stuck processes in the original tab.

Mike doesn't use a hosting service. He owns the hardware, which is in his home connected to a business-class connection. I don't know the download speed, but the upload (sending data out to us users) is 10Mb.

That said, I did notice a time last evening when the server was completely unavailable - not just the forums, but even for me via command line. Since I'm on the West coast, that would have been about right for your problem time back East, FW.

I've done some checking and moving the site to a hosting service would cost $400 a month or more. Everything on our site is considered "active" and uses a lot of database and disk resources. We have nearly 61,000 visitors per week to the site, so the traffic is considered medium-grade. Our database itself is nearly 20GB zipped up (compressed).

As far as the connection, we are running on a business-class cable modem with an average speed of 10Mbps. I don't have any kind of throttling enabled on the system, but, I'm thinking any kind of timeout at this point would be related to back-end maintenance. The server is always running some kind of system background maintenance and it usually saves the heavier tasks for the evening (in the Pacific timezone).

m

Wow, I'm impressed, Mike!

Anyway, PM me anytime if you want to chat with my friend about hosting. I think she would probably be much cheaper than that $400 mark. You'd have the benefit of a UNIX system on a T1. I don't know if you can do what you need to do in a UNIX environment. I'm sure there's periodic maintenance on her system, but it's probably just background backups -- no virus scanning and such. Then again, if she's running a RAID-1, which I suspect there is, there's probably not even that.

Mike's system is running on Linux, not Windows. It runs on a pair of dedicated RAID-5 arrays, one for OS and data, the second dedicated to the database. It also serves up several different websites on different domains. The data and images for ClassicZCars alone is about 30GB. It would not be a simple site for a hosting service to host.