Forum Goes Down All the Time

[John Morgan]

Dave,

After having been using the forum rather regularly for several months, I must say that I hope you don't pay too much for whoever it is that is hosting this for you. I don't think there has been a day that I haven't experienced HTTP 503 errors (Service Unavailable) or "The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later."

Are you aware that this is happening? Are others experiencing this also? I love the forum, but it sure does go haywire much more often than one would expect.

John

[John Morgan]

Okay, sorry, I just read the post a couple down from this. Looks like this has been a problem for some time.

A couple things: if you are paying more than $10/month for the hosting, you are getting ripped off and way underserved. I have been hosting (off site and paying for it) websites for many years, and pay about $100-$120 a year to do so, with 99.99%+ up time. Some of those using PHP. "NEVER" experienced the constant errors and offline occurrences as on your forum. The business about breaking "PHP" is baloney. That host is either cheesy beyond belief or they have a bunch of nitwits working there. You could not tolerate someone breaking PHP and then everyone suffering while a reboot is done. All day long. That is nonsense.

The downtime on your forum has been increasing with frequency and length. Just after I sent the message above, it was down for several minutes. You should be screaming at these people. You are paying for a service and they are not providing it. And I have experienced downtimes on the order of a half hour before.

My master's degree is in computer science. I know a little bit about this. And I know it is your site and your business, but I hate seeing people being served up baloney and lousy service when they don't have to be.

[davewerden]

I know, believe me! I have plans to change hosting providers, but it's a large job. Currently my day job has me going about 50+ hours a week. Once I get some free time I will work on moving.

How do you usually get to the forum? If you just type dwerden.com you end up on my home page, which is driven by ColdFusion. But the forum is running on PHP. One can be down while the other is up. So if you want to go right to the forum I would either bookmark it or go to www.dwerden.com/forum. (For now)

[John Morgan]

I usually go to your home page and select Forum from there. So I sometimes get nothing on your home page. Usually at that point, I do a google search on something that I know will turn up a dwerden.com/forum page, and it, too, is typically down. But I will keep that in mind and give that a try in the future. I know the pain involved in switching hosts. Oh, do I know the pain!!

Dave aren't you getting to be as old as I am? Time to slow down?? Smell the roses??? Play your horn???? Please don't work yourself into the grave. Nothing is more important than living and family and music. I don't think "working" was in there!!!

[DaveBj]

I've got the forum bookmarked, so I go straight to it. Once in a while it's down, but not multiple times a day. It is down more than other forums I visit.

[John Morgan]

Dave Bj: Today alone, it was down and up and down and up at least a half dozen times, with some of the outages lasting for several minutes. And then when it goes down, the posts that you have looked at (which should remove the "something new doodad"), came back as if I had not looked at any of them. At least, that was my experience.