Website Slowdown

[Byron Begley]

Lately, especially for the last few days we have experienced a slow-down on our website or even a complete shutdown. Our website is hosted on a server at a data center in Washington, DC that is owned by Nippon Telephone, the largest website provider in the world. Our site is shared on a server with other clients. All clients are alloted a certain number of processes at one time. If your site exceeds that number the offending client is notified to either cut down their processes or get moved to a larger space on a server and pay more. We did just that a couple of months ago. We pay about $175 per month for our alloted number of processes. I've been keeping a window open on a laptop in my office that shows everything that is happening on our site and some numbers that refer to what's happening on the total server. Evidently, one of the clients on our server is doing a large mass e-mail and those numbers top out. The ones we watch are Load Average which needs to be under 100%. Another is % Idle which needs to be a high number. Our site just went down a few minutes ago. The Load Average exceeded 1,000 % and the % idle was 0%. It had nothing to do with our site but someone else on the server.

At 3:00 am tomorrow our site will be moved to another server. They picked this time because we will have a temporary shutdown. Our website consultant, Thom Ashton thinks this will solve our problem. We will be on a server that does not have many clients. As we grow we may need to have a dedicated server which will cost a minimum of $600 per month. It's not unusual for an online store to pay $3,000 per month for their server.

We are sorry for this inconvenience and we will stay on top of this, it's part of running a website.

Thanks for your patience. Byron

[thebig21]

Just please keep it up. I have learned more about fly fishing from this website than I have on the water. Thanks for everything!!

[kriscad]

I own a very large music website (150,000+ members) that is on a dedicated box with www.ev1servers.net - been with them for 5-6 years now... you can get a great box for $300-500.00 per month, which may be overkill for your site based on your alexa traffic details.

I still log in via SSH daily to check things out but since we upgraded to 4 gig of ram, I can finally sleep at night knowing the site will not be down. So, if you do move to a dedicated box, make sure you get enough ram!

goodluck

[Byron Begley]

Thanks for the info kriscad and welcome to the board.

Byron