Welcome back! Outage information here.

[Fast Learner]

I agree that in a co-lo situation, Cyberstreet has gone above the call of duty. Good job!

I do wonder, though, if ENWorld should be co-loed instead of leasing a server. I'm unfortunately still to broke to buy an account (donated in the past but am broke now), but if I had paid for won, based on the money raised it would seem like leased servers (with near-instant repair) would be a better route.

Just one guy's opinion, though, and obviously I don't know the details of everything.

 

[Thomas Heretic]

I agree that in a co-lo situation, Cyberstreet has gone above the call of duty. Good job!

I do wonder, though, if ENWorld should be co-loed instead of leasing a server. I'm unfortunately still to broke to buy an account (donated in the past but am broke now), but if I had paid for won, based on the money raised it would seem like leased servers (with near-instant repair) would be a better route.

Just one guy's opinion, though, and obviously I don't know the details of everything.

I certainly don't know all the details, but if you already have a server co-location is cheaper than hosting, at least it is when we are talking about the amount of bandwidth EN World chews up.
In the long run it is cheaper to buy a server and co-locate it then have a dedicated hosted service, ie lease a server, but it is cheaper in the short run to be hosted.
For a mid range server it would probably cost another $150-$200/month on top of the bandwidth charges.

 

[drothgery]

I don't know what the bandwidth and utilization data look like (or how ENWorld's servers are actually set up), but it seems to me (based on observed performance and the frequency of outages, ignoring the ones caused by hurricanes) that what ENWorld has for server/servers is/are not adequate to keeping up with the demands of serving the current forum software with a community the size of ENWorld.

Doing anything about this may be difficult, as I'm almost certain that Morris got as much server and bandwidth as he could afford, and setting up redundant front-end servers is not cheap or trivial. But almost nothing can kill an online community faster than consistent availability issues.

 

[Piratecat]

You're preaching to the choir. We just don't have enough funds to continue paying for monthly hosting AND upgrade the server. Want to guess which is getting precedence?

 

[wingsandsword]

You're preaching to the choir. We just don't have enough funds to continue paying for monthly hosting AND upgrade the server. Want to guess which is getting precedence?

We all know what the cure for that is, more people need to get Community Supporter accounts.

When I next get paid, I'm buying one, I come here too often and for too long (since back in '99 when it was just 3e rumors) to not give a little back, and I'd like to be able to search too .

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Ha ha h--HEY?! I still use DOS! It's great! I can run all my old, wonderful programs on it, like WordPerfect 5.1 (the only true word processing program).

I have to run Windows 98 because the newer version don't provide DOS, though. Heck, even Windows 98's DOS won't let me run some of my really old programs, so I keep my 386 handy too.

Heh, you are not alone - Word Perfect 12 has a Word Perfect 5.1 compatability mode.

The Auld Grump

*EDIT* For that matter I still have a Win 98 machine that I use for XCom...

 

[Isida Kep'Tukari]

Man, after this latest outage, the first thing I did was buy me a Community Supporter membership. We like our motherboards, oh yes we do. And I like ENWorld, yes I do. I spend way too much time here, seriously. (Looks at PbP sig) I think I'm addicted...



And I like it!

 

[Algolei]

There's a WP 12 now?? What's the world coming to? What oh what?

 

[drothgery]

You're preaching to the choir. We just don't have enough funds to continue paying for monthly hosting AND upgrade the server. Want to guess which is getting precedence?

Just a minor FYI if you ever do have the funds [or decide Something Must Be Done and launch another major fundraising drive or something] -- get someone who really knows what they're doing (not me; I'm a web developer who's always had the luxury of a full-time sysadmin) to analyze things and figure out what the actual bottlenecks are. Upgrading the server might very well have little effect if the slowdowns are caused by traffic eating all of your bandwidth (or even all of your co-lo service's bandwidth, in an extreme case), and if a system upgrade would help, it's quite possible that upgrading the hard drives will help more than upgrading the CPU(s) or the amount of memory.