Hi all,

Wanted to thank everyone for your patience yesterday (Sept 3) during our server maintenance. During this time we had a chance to perform a full data backup, upgrades, and finally move our system to a capable server that will support our needs for growth. As usual, please feel free to let me know if you run into any issues and log them here.

Mike

Mike - Response time is really quick. It looks you made some excellent tuning improvements. Many thanks!

Same here, thanks. Haven't had any problems in awhile.

Well done...Thanks, Mike

You don't realize how much you like(need) this site until its down. I think I started getting the shakes

Thanks for the hard work Mike

Did you install a turbo on that server? Love it! BIG THANKS

I thought I heard the server VTEC kick in.

Thanks guys, the twin turbos are running smoothly...

Partial dweeb, so what the heck did you do?

Response time is VERY good, really snaps. So far no dreaded Db errors.

Still on a virtual server?

Partial dweeb, so what the heck did you do?

Response time is VERY good, really snaps. So far no dreaded Db errors.

Still on a virtual server?

Yes, we are still virtual. The first server was being hosted by a company that severely overstated their resources. They advertised things like 2.5GB of RAM, dual core CPU, and X-amount of bandwidth transfers. Well, after looking at it further, I noticed that all of these resources were shared and the data transfer was limited to a trickle. I think they had us running limited to 30-40Kbps. Whenever I would run something in the background like a database backup, the process would take so long, I swore they were also splitting my dual CPU and sharing it with others. Anyway, I started to see all of this when the site was at full load (typically during the afternoon and evenings).

The fix was to move the website to a different machine with dedicated resources and fully allocated data plan. Right now we are running on a Vmware ESXi server under a virtual instance of Centos 6.4. The way we are able to move the website from host-to-host so easily is due to our control panel called Plesk. This control panel is one of the best ways to manage the site from a back-end perspective (in my opinion). If I decide to change hosting providers or need to switch out some hardware, the automatic migration tools are second to none. Although they do require that our site is offline for 12-18 hours or so... One day I'll figure out how to move the site around without taking it offline...

Anyway, I wanted more space to plan for our migration to a new platform. vBulletin is starting to worry me and I've been considering a move to a new database for some time.. That's a longer-term effort, so I needed to make sure our host was going to allow expansion.

Makes perfect sense to me!

Are there issues w/ vBulletin ??? Would a switch drastically change the appearance or the function of the website?

Charles

Are there issues w/ vBulletin ??? Would a switch drastically change the appearance or the function of the website? Charles

No issues with vBulletin. They have been very good at supporting the 4.x version, which is what we are using. However, I am concerned with their plan going forward. 5.0 product looks like it has some issues since they replaced the whole development team a year or so ago. I've been considering other options but we have a lot of custom areas that will need attention.

M