Why did HA go offline?

[Shemp]

Who is the sysadmin for this site? If it isn't fschmidt, maybe get him to recommend somebody.

[Ghost]

.

[Shemp]

Since the forum has been going down a lot recently and Winston is MIA most of the time, this might be a good time to discuss a backup plan - a place for HA members to go elsewhere on the internet or keep in contact if or when the forum goes down permanently. Anyone have ideas?

I currently split my time between here and SwoopTheWorld forum. if you like the vibe there, create an account now before someone else grabs your name.

[Cornfed]

Since HA went offline for so long, you would think someone would be trying to make things right by, for example, deleting the spammers on the 100 lasts posts page.

[Ghost]

.

[Winston]

Who is the sysadmin for this site? If it isn't fschmidt, maybe get him to recommend somebody.

Fschmidt and other moderators cannot fix the forum when it goes down. The only thing I can do is contact Bluehost via live chat and ask them to reboot the server. Moderators cannot do that because they cannot access my server or webhosting admin panel.

Sorry I didn't know it was down. I was busy with Dianne and Angelo in Taiwan for the last two weeks. And my friends on WhatsApp didn't let me know until later and plus I didn't check WhatsApp for a while either.

We really need to move off Bluehost or move back to shared hosting premium, where the webhost admins would make sure the server doesn't go down, or repair it if it does.

[Cornfed]

And this time?

[Winston]

Sorry about that. How long was the forum down this time?

It seems that two days ago, 534 users were online here. That might have caused a crash, it set a new record. I don't know what caused that. It was either a traffic spike from a mention on a popular blog or website. Or a hacker attack.

WHO IS ONLINE
In total there are 278 users online :: 5 registered, 0 hidden and 242 guests (based on users active over the past 5 minutes)
Most users ever online was 534 on August 14th, 2019, 6:12 pm

[Cornfed]

And this time? (BTW, for Christ's sake do something about the spam).

[Winston]

I don't know what happened. I talked to a live agent from Bluehost. He kept rebooting the server several times but it kept getting stuck and crashing. Same with the MYSQL too. So he had to escalate my ticket to a higher department last night. Very odd. Usually rebooting the server fixes it. This time it must have been much worse. Perhaps a hacker planted something nasty in the server? I'll do a malware scan and check. I was really pissed last night too.

Plus my phone broke from water damage after I tried to use it in the rain at a Cambodian temple yesterday. I kept wiping the phone screen and assumed it would work like before. But this time the rain was heavy and busted my phone. I hope a cell phone shop here can fix it. I should have gotten one of those plastic things in Thailand that lets you use your phone underwater at the beach. They were being sold everywhere at the beach. That would have prevented this from happening. I didn't think I would ever need it. But as you know, hindsight is 20/20.

[Cornfed]

And again (and the f***ing spammers).

[Cornfed]

There seem to be ongoing problems.

[fschmidt]

There seem to be ongoing problems.

With the modern world. Why should HA be an exception?

[Cornfed]

There seem to be ongoing problems.

With the modern world. Why should HA be an exception?

HA seems to be worse than average at the moment.

[Winston]

Yeah the forum and site seem to be going down everyday now, as well as my server. No one knows what's going on. Bluehost tech support just told me:

I have tried all the possible trouble shooting from my end but was not able to find the root cause for the server going down again and again. The further investigation requires higher level access. This is the reason I have already created the ticket for this.

They said they will create a ticket to a higher dept to look into the cause of this. It's happening everyday now and is unacceptable. Why does VPS suck so badly? I thought it was supposed to be better? The thing is, on shared hosting, when the server or website needs more resources and is carrying a bigger load, more resources will automatically be brought from other servers to compensate and aid the server. But with VPS, when the server is overloaded, there are no backup resources, it just crashes. That's what sucks about it. Why then does VPS work for others? I don't get it. I don't see any advantage in VPS at all.

So our options now would seem to be:

1. Add more RAM and CPU's to the server to increase its memory.

2. Move back to shared hosting, where backup resources are automatically drawn from during a server overload, to prevent it from crashing. When we were on GoDaddy shared hosting, this site rarely crashed, if you all remember.

What do you guys think? Right now I am on vacation and don't have time to deal with this. What timing. Murphy's Law again. I guess for now, I should purchase some add on memory to our VPS server in the meantime, so this doesn't happen again hopefully, until I figure out what to do next?

Btw, I just looked at the bottom of the forum index page, and it says that 640 people were online at the same time here the other day! Wow that's another record! How is it that our traffic is doubling or tripling all of a sudden? Are these legit users or hackers/spam bots? How can you tell? Maybe that's what's causing our server to crash? The increased traffic?

Let's just try to add more memory for now and see.