As you may have already noticed, our current hosting arrangement leaves something to be desired. There are occasional but regular brief outages (30 seconds to 2 minutes) and more occasional longer outages (10 minutes plus) with absolutely no explanation, and of course the fact that the wiki and forums are all on the same server means that when this happens, there's no Paradox until that changes.
Obviously, this is a direct result of the fact that Paradox is currently not funded by anything other than whatever cash we can scrounge together and, let's face it, that's pretty meagre.
So in lieu of some incredibly rich benefactor suddenly deciding to foot the bill for awesome hosting (although if you're exceedingly wealthy and that's something you feel like doing, we won't say no), I'm currently on the lookout for anyone who may be in a position to provide us with slightly more advanced/reliable hosting at very affordable rates (free is better).
Our requirements are as follows:
-Linux/BSD/Unix host preferable, Windows host acceptable if necessary provided the other requirements are met
-Apache 2.x
-MySQL 5.x
-PHP 5.x
-Shell/Command Line access (SSH preferred)
-Scheduled Tasks (Cron jobs)
-FTP access
-Reasonable storage limits (100MB+)
-Awesome data transfer limits (several GB per month)
-Prefer multiple servers so if the game is down, at least the forums and wiki remain accessible.
If you are, or know someone who is, able to provide this, please let me know.
Cheers,
Gobb
PS. Please don't tell me that XYZ hosting company (GoDaddy, Hostmonster, whatever) has great plans. We're already on what I consider to be the best of these budget plans (ie. plans within our price range) and they all suffer from the same issues we're currently having, ie. shared servers lead to unpredictable behaviour caused by stupid people.
Server Hosting Wanted/Needed - Please Help
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Gobberwart
Topic author - Developer
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Gobberwart
Topic author - Developer
- Posts: 3396
- Joined: Wed Jun 20, 2007 12:41 am
- Location: Melbourne, Australia
- Contact:
Re: Server Hosting Wanted/Needed - Please Help
Something happened yesterday that has made this even more important. During some testing yesterday, with only around half-a-dozen users logged on, suddenly we were all treated to this message:
===========================================
This Account Has Exceeded Its CPU Quota
Please contact this site's webmaster.
Wait a few minutes and use your browser's "Back" button or click here to try again.
If you are the webmaster, your account may have exceeded for one or more of the following reasons:
* Your site has used more than 20% of the cpu.
* Your account has too many processes running at the same time.
* Your site was consuming too many resources. This happens on occassion to very busy sites that have inefficient scripts running.
===========================================
Erm, what? On checking through a number of logs, there was no particular script or query that seemed to be causing a problem, rather it appears that issues elsewhere on the shared host caused some of our processes to take longer than they should (up to 10 seconds for VERY simple queries), which then flags as problem with this site and causes the above error.
An example of a slow query as flagged by the server:
"SELECT name FROM user WHERE id = 1 LIMIT 1"
Table contains 65 records, id is the PRIMARY KEY, the record with id = 1 comes first... Why does THAT take 8 seconds?
That's totally unacceptable as far as I'm concerned, not just that it happened, but that arrogant error message ("...sites that have inefficient scripts running.") is just plain unprofessional. Sure, I get that they don't want a ridiculous mysql query to run for 10 minutes and prevent other users accessing it, but when it is the mysql server that is causing the processes to take so long, (and it is, mostly, the server has been very patchy reliability-wise) then it's not good enough.
For what it's worth, I am aware that some changes can me made to improve the efficiency of the site, and I'll make them, although if anyone can tell me how I can possibly optimise the select query shown above I'll be amazed. The point is that, if Hostmonster can not cope with half a dozen users reliably (even though we had 12 earlier in the day with no issues), then they're no good for our purposes.
Any suggestions welcome.
===========================================
This Account Has Exceeded Its CPU Quota
Please contact this site's webmaster.
Wait a few minutes and use your browser's "Back" button or click here to try again.
If you are the webmaster, your account may have exceeded for one or more of the following reasons:
* Your site has used more than 20% of the cpu.
* Your account has too many processes running at the same time.
* Your site was consuming too many resources. This happens on occassion to very busy sites that have inefficient scripts running.
===========================================
Erm, what? On checking through a number of logs, there was no particular script or query that seemed to be causing a problem, rather it appears that issues elsewhere on the shared host caused some of our processes to take longer than they should (up to 10 seconds for VERY simple queries), which then flags as problem with this site and causes the above error.
An example of a slow query as flagged by the server:
"SELECT name FROM user WHERE id = 1 LIMIT 1"
Table contains 65 records, id is the PRIMARY KEY, the record with id = 1 comes first... Why does THAT take 8 seconds?
That's totally unacceptable as far as I'm concerned, not just that it happened, but that arrogant error message ("...sites that have inefficient scripts running.") is just plain unprofessional. Sure, I get that they don't want a ridiculous mysql query to run for 10 minutes and prevent other users accessing it, but when it is the mysql server that is causing the processes to take so long, (and it is, mostly, the server has been very patchy reliability-wise) then it's not good enough.
For what it's worth, I am aware that some changes can me made to improve the efficiency of the site, and I'll make them, although if anyone can tell me how I can possibly optimise the select query shown above I'll be amazed. The point is that, if Hostmonster can not cope with half a dozen users reliably (even though we had 12 earlier in the day with no issues), then they're no good for our purposes.
Any suggestions welcome.
