This is crazy

[Zakina]

The owner of this site needs to change hosting company....The forum is non- accesible(sp?) every other minute

 

[VelvetRain]

Geez try to give Beverly and Nikos a break. We all missed the forum too and I am glad it's back up but this situation happens on almost every message board I have been on. Besides it not that frequently it goes down.

 

[dimopoulos]

The owner of this site needs to change hosting company....The forum is non- accesible(sp?) every other minute

Thanks for the suggestion. I will discuss this with Beverly and act accordingly.

Although I did not get any alarms from our hosting company, to give you the benefit of the doubt, I did check the network traffic and there was nothing wrong with it i.e. the internet was working fine. So two other possible reasons:

1. Your isp had a problem and you couldn't access the site.
2. The forum software/database was at fault rendering the site inaccessible.

If it was the first option, then you need to talk to your ISP. Nothing we can do there.

If however it was option 2, I did see earlier that there was database corruption on one of the tables and corrected it. If you are referring to that yes you are right the site was down. One thing to acknowledge though is that we do not have or can afford to have a person 24/7 to look at the site itself. We do have technical support 24/7 to look at the server itself if it fails but not the site. There is a big difference there, since if we don't check the site we won't know it is down should a problem like the one today happened.

So we are left with some options here.

* We can do what you suggest and change hosting companies. This in itself will mean downtime and 2 weeks without the search engine (it will need to be rebuilt again since we cannot transport the site with the search index on - the data is massive). The move itself will also need to be paid for per hour bare in mind. Last time I moved the site to the new server I spent more than 22 hours straight. If I were to be paid for this (which I wasn't) I would have needed a lot of $5.00 subscriptions to cover it. However moving the site wouldn't have done a single thing if the database was at fault (as some of you experienced this morning). Like I said the hosting company monitors the server not the software.

* We can also have a dedicated person or rather 3 to take a look at the server on a 24/7 basis. Taking the 8 hour shift we need 3 per day. Calculate the minimum wage that each of those persons would need, multiply that with 3 and with 30 (for the month), add the nightshift addition to the wage plus the holidays/weekends. Then the figure you come up, multiply it by 12 to see how much money we need per year and then finally divide it by the $5.00 each member pays to see how many subscribed members we need to have just to have those people monitoring the software. Don't forget to add to the costs also the $450.00 per month we already pay for the new server. If that scenario works with you then we will do it - I sincerely doubt it though. To implement what you propose and to have the people monitoring the software of the site 24/7, we will need to increase the subscription to $50.00. I am sure that nobody would like this - I wouldn't.

So in all fairness if you can find a better solution than the one we have, please suggest it and we will implement it. Since I am mostly involved in the technical side of the site, you don't expect me to be online 24/7 do you? I do have to sleep and do have other things that I have to do in my personal and professional life.

The only thing to do when a problem like the one experienced today is to open a ticket in the support system. We will act when we see it unless we happen to see it for ourselves when it happens.

And for the record - we rarely do this but I will make an exception on this. If you don't like the site cause it is down or whatever, let me know and I will send you your money back with an apology and a smile; no questions asked.

 

[Estee]

Dimopoulos,

ITA with you! As a fellow techie I know how time-consuming and complicated managing servers and software can be. Folks tend to take for granted all the things that go on behind the scenes to maintain Internet sites.

Thanks for all your efforts.

 

[Mom23]

Dimopoulos,

ITA with you! As a fellow techie I know how time-consuming and complicated managing servers and software can be. Folks tend to take for granted all the things that go on behind the scenes to maintain Internet sites.

Thanks for all your efforts.

I agree THANK YOU!!

 

[felicia]

i tend to agree. this is getting a little out of hand. the site barely works for 10 minutes at a time for me and it's not my computer or isp. i'm not being ungrateful, i do appreciate the efforts, but this is quite annoying.

 

[Blaque*Angel]

Thanks for all your hard work and good efforts Dimopoulos .

 

[mermaid]

I couldn't get on for more than a day either. Kept getting the "technical problem/email sent to administrators/try to refresh" or whatever it says message.
I delete the cookies on a regular basis, but I did NOT do it before I finally was able to get on tonight.

 

[beverly]

I do understand your frustrations.. We are working on this and are aware of this issue - it is not the hosting company as was previously mentioned because - we have a dedicated server for this site.

If any one is unhappy with the services, please send an email to the paypal email address that you paid for your subscription with or submit a support ticket, and I will issue you a full refund and close your account. We do however expect to have these issues resolved in the next few weeks and thank you for your patience.