HA is now hosted on a VPS (Virtual Private Server)

[Winston]

@Winston If your hosting company (BlueHost) cannot tell you the exact reason why your site keeps crashing, then dump them and switch to better hosting company. I've had very good experience with putting my clients on Siteground.

Well now they do have an explanation for why this forum keeps crashing. They claim it's because I only have 10 percent disk space left and that's not enough for MySQL processes. I don't know why that would be though. The only way to fix that would be to upgrade and pay more. I don't get why I would wanna do that since I can pay 1/10 the amount and get more. It doesn't make sense.

What are Siteground's rates? Do you have a link to their pricing? What's their website?

Thanks.

[TruthSeeker]

Before doing business with any company you'll want to read the reviews.

Go to RipoffReport.com and search Siteground.

[publicduende]

@publicduende: I don't think you read my post correctly. We've been on VPS since 2014 or so. It's been nothing but trouble. The forum crashed far less on SHARED hosting with Godaddy. So VPS has been a lot of trouble with no benefits. What's the benefit of paying 10 times more for less hosting space and more problems and no free backup like with shared hosting? I can't see any logical reason. Can you? It's not like we have millions of people on here that would require dedicated hosting. Premium shared hosting has plenty of backup resources and I don't have to manage any server. Why do I need to manage the server if admins can manage it? As long as it's running why would I need to manage it? I don't get that.

So basically I don't need to control my server on a VPS or have control over aspects of the server. All I want is for the forum and site to run smoothly and for the process to be as automated as possible. Shared hosting should be enough for that. I don't see why having control over aspects of a server is necessary at all. I prefer to focus on content creation, not managing a server.

@Winston LOL touche'...I didn't read the post well and thought that you were offered VPS as a solution. VPS means HA is hosted on some dedicated virtual (hardware) resources but doesn't say how much resources you have available. No offense, I don't think the traffic to this site is higher than it used to be a 4 or 5 years ago. Assuming their VPS offering has never changed or degraded over time, the simplest explanation for the MySQL failures can only be the continuously growing size of the database and its impact on the storage (filesystem).

I think it makes sense that you ask BlueHost or, better, a trusted party to survey the current size of the HA phpBB database and give you some honest advice as to what configuration you need to run it smoothly. My gut feeling is that BlueHost is hinting at the fact that you need a beefier VPS solution (more RAM and more storage space), yet they are trying to lure you into getting (and paying for!) much more than what you need!

Also, I agree that BlueHost might not be (or no longer be) the best or the cheapest solution on the market. You may wanna start shopping around. This one, for example.

https://www.a2hosting.com/phpbb-hosting

[TruthSeeker]

@Winston how do you know that Bluehost really put you on a VPS? Maybe they just kept you on shared hosting to make more money from you. Is there any way for you to verify you are really on VPS?

How do you know they are not crashing your database every once in a while to get you to pay for a higher plan?

I can't imagine that the forum takes up that much disk space because it's only text. No images or videos are stored in the database except for the user's avatar. Is there any way for you to check how much disk space you are really using?