VFDC server status

I'm quite sure many of you have noticed that since we moved to a new host, VFDC has experienced some unscheduled down-time on occasions. By my count it's been happening on an almost weekly basis (which is pretty poor by any standard!)

This is just a brief note to explain why this has been happening, and what I have been doing to rectify it.

When we were rudely shutdown by our previous hosts at the end of July (early August), we were on a shared hosting plan. That is, our website, along with many other websites, were all running off the same hardware, competing for the same resources. As such, the performance of the site wasn't particularly great (or even good), but since the server it was on and its resources were managed by the host, unscheduled down time was rarely experienced. Next to negligible even.

But now, since we've moved to a new host, VFDC is on it's own Virtual Private Server (VPS). This essentially means more power and resoures, but it also means more responsibility in maintaining and looking after the server. In a way, as well as being the web administrator for the site, I'm also the system administrator for the entire server.

So why is VFDC going down? Well, the short answer is that some critical processes on the server end up being killed due to memory limits being exceeded. What is causing these processes to exceed limits? Well, that's what I'm still trying to figure out. It's part detective work, part learning for me, as I've never really had systems administration responsibility for a server running a website on the internet.

One of the main causes for concern (for me), is the amount of search engines, bots, spiders, crawlers, etc, that hit the site constantly. I don't quite know how they're impacting the server just yet, but this is one area I'm trying to keep an eye one.

I am taking steps to monitor this and other activities, as well as writing/trialling some scripts that will check the server's "pulse" and revive any critial processes that have died.

I just ask that you all be patient over the coming weeks as I attempt to improve the stability of the server. Of couse, I could pay the hosts to do this for me, but that would incur an additonal $12.50 USD/month on top of the $50 USD/month I'm already paying just to host the site.

Compare this to the $5/month we were paying on the shared hosting plan, Unfortunately, the site and the resources it requires has outgrown anything a shared host can provide us.

 

It's been about 2 weeks since I posted a status update, and I've been pretty happy with the server since then. It seems the monitoring scripts I've put in place are doing their job rather well.

Thanks for your patience.