Today

[gstark]

Sorry about the downtime today.

I got a call early this morning asking me to fill in for an ill presenter at the radio station, so I said sure.

Then I got up, and found that Bluehost had suspended my account due to "slow SQL queries".

Ok, fair enough, if they're taking everything into account. But I don't believe that they do. It's my belief that they look at the queries in isolation, without regard to anything else that's happening on the (shared) box. So, if some other user has a process that pushes server resources to a high number, it's an expected outcome that all tasks on the box, including any SQL queries, will slow down.

The problem for me is that this site is very SQL intensive, and any such excessive usage by others will hit me very quickly. And as (I believe) that they are not looking at the server as a whole, I'm toast.

I can't be bothered arguing the point with them over how they read the servers; I think they're wrong, but I have no evidence of this, and when I can't physically access the boxes to demonstrate my points ...

For the moment, I've moved the database back to Bondi, and so there may be some degradation in performance. I apologise for that.

And I'm exploring other solutions: while the basic experience at BH is good, when they shut you down, without warning, I think that's unprofessional.

It's also dumb: they send you an email to your email address, which is hosted at BH, but because your site and account has been disabled, you can't access the bloody email. How dumb is that?

And I still haven't even started to do the errands I need to do.

[ATJ]

Bastards!

[Reschsmooth]

Yeah, thanks for making me do some work today, Gary.

[Matt. K]

Scumbags!

[radar]

Gary,

glad it's back

It is a bit slower but still performing reasonably well. I find Bluehost's method for dealing with server problems quite draconian, to say the least. Good luck sorting it out.

cheers,

André

[photohiker]

Gary,

Commiserations. This stuff is a right pain in the rear when it happens.

So you currently have the BB on BH but the DB on your own host at Bondi?

Whilst it might not be what you thought you wanted, this may point towards a reasonable solution to the problem of cheap hosting and the resulting tradeoff of performance on shared services. For sure, once the hosting service gets popular, they seem to squeeze more out of every server and inevitably performance suffers. For BB's, that is usually the ability of the DB to respond - with your own DB host, at least you can control the horsepower applied to the work...

Good luck with it.

Michael

[gstark]

Yeah, thanks for making me do some work today, Gary.

I'm sorry Patrick.

So you currently have the BB on BH but the DB on your own host at Bondi?

Yep. I want to see how badly it runs this way. Bandwidth, in terms of capacity here, shouldn't be an issue for me. The only issue that I see would be one of speed, with queries being initiated by members, going to the BH server, coming here, processing the responses here, and then sending them back. It's a lot of frequent flier miles.

It'll be an interesting exercise monitoring all of this, but I may move one of the sites' homes to somewhere other than BH too, so that if anything like this happens again, I can bypass it rather more quickly.

Whilst it might not be what you thought you wanted, this may point towards a reasonable solution to the problem of cheap hosting and the resulting tradeoff of performance on shared services. For sure, once the hosting service gets popular, they seem to squeeze more out of every server and inevitably performance suffers. For BB's, that is usually the ability of the DB to respond - with your own DB host, at least you can control the horsepower applied to the work...

The interesting thing with BH is that, in the main, sever performance seems to be very good, and their support is quite good as well. This morning, I was using the live chat and had at least my control panel back within a few minutes of identifying the problem. Not sure of the actual, but less than 15 minutes would not be an exaggeration.

In terms of getting the site back up this afternoon, I'd already (this morning) pulled a backup of the database down to here, so it was just a matter of firing up the linux box (that's been sitting idle for about four months now) and installing the backup onto it, and then configuring it to accept the external connections, punching a hole in the firewall for the queries to come through, and then changing the configuration files at BH to point to the server here in Bondi.

Curiously, I wasn't able to use a non-standard port coming out of BH. Obviously a firewall issue at that end, but ever so slightly less secure for me. NBD.

Once that was done, I gave them a call, the call was answered within a minute, and after a bit of discussion and a little waiting - they asked me to pull down the old database that was causing the problems - all was back up.

As I noted about their mindlessness earlier, so too is their request to pull down the database: I could very easily create a new one with a different name and import the data from my backups, change my configuration to point to this new database, and Bob's your uncle.

I can't remember the specific horsepower in the box I'm now using for the DB; I need to check.

Of course, with my earlier commitment to do the radio fill-in, I had nowhere near enough time this morning to let me focus on this problem and get it resolved earlier.

[Glen]

Thanks Gary for all the work, it is much appreciated

[the foto fanatic]

Thanks Gary for all the work, it is much appreciated

Yes, ditto from me. Although what you have explained so far makes as much sense to me as reading a Bulgarian novel would.

[rookie2]

Thanks Gary for all the work, it is much appreciated

Yes, ditto from me. Although what you have explained so far makes as much sense to me as reading a Bulgarian novel would.

Thanks Gary!
R2

[stubbsy]

Thanks Gary - I'd have loved to have been a fly on the wall as you patiently and unemaotionally explained to them what you thought of t(a) heir logic and (b) their unilateral disconection of the site

[who]

Can't say I noticed -- but good work Gary.

Only other option is maybe to look to us bandwidth users for contributions and move to a dedicated server somewhere?

But this is your empire..... doin't let me tell you how to be dictator

[gstark]

Thanks Gary - I'd have loved to have been a fly on the wall as you patiently and unemaotionally explained to them what you thought of t(a) heir logic and (b) their unilateral disconection of the site

I actually sent off an email to their owner, offering some constructive criticism, and he actually sent me back a response. I won't bore y'all with the full content, but you should remember that I was a little critical of some of their support staff, in that they think they know it all ...

From his response ...

Most support techs aren't system savvy enough to understand the under the hood mechanics of the way we do things especially since it incorporates many custom patches that are unique to our hosting service.

So, he's in agreement with me that there is perhaps a training issue here (that's how I expressed this problem in my email) but the question and problem that remains is how to suggest to him that this needs to be recognised by his mid-level managers, and then addressed, but to do so without hurting any egos.

Ian, I expect to move the database from Bondi to a VPS sometime today. That'll result in about an hour downtime, but should hopefully improve the response times again. We've found a VPS host that seems reasonable in price, and with what appears to be an honest, forthright attitude. I'm going to be slowly migrating a few things there, and we'll see what happens. I'll probably move one of the D70 sites there in the short term, and that will allow me to assess any speed differentials, given that they'll all be using the same database.

The problem with the hosting of the database here is not the cpu capabilities, nor the bandwidth, but merely the connection speeds to and from Bondi.

[who]

Ian, I expect to move the database from Bondi to a VPS sometime today........The problem with the hosting of the database here is not the cpu capabilities, nor the bandwidth, but merely the connection speeds to and from Bondi.

Is it all the freeloading kiwis slowing down the cable or ADSL Lucky you aren't based in Tassie - the connection would truly suffer. I won't mention the hassles I have had in the past.......

[gstark]

Is it all the freeloading kiwis slowing down the cable or ADSL

No; they've all moved over to Manly. That happened several years ago, and now we have Brazilians, Germans, tons of Irish (they're easy to spot - they're the ones with skin that's whiter than a geek's) and Japanese all fighting for the spare bed in the two bedroom apartment being rented out to 16 backpackers.

But in an event memorable for its excellence in timing and execution, within a couple of hours of signing up for this new VPS servic, it went down. A whole raft of subnets.

It wasn't a major issue however. Well, actually, it was: they had a major scheduled maintenance event where they were relocating their datacenter, so everything was down for about six hours.

Of course, they had emailed all of their clients a week in advance of this event ... but I wasn't a client of their's until just a couple of hours before everything went down, and so I wasn't a recipient of that email.

I have the site running CentOS 4.7, Apache 2 something, MySQL something, BIND 9 ...

I've moved a copy of the dataset from here into the database there, and I was hoping to replicate the changes since that backup was created, but that's not been working for me due to a couple of deficiencies in the phpbb3 database: not all of the tables have primary indexes. They have indexes, but for some tables, none of them are specified as being primary.

That all means that I ned to turn the site off, backup the database and load it onto the alternate server, and then turn the site back on. About two hours, because of the slow upload speed from here.

The speed of the placeholder sites seems good, but those are just very small static sites.

Hopefully I will get to do this later today.

[gstark]

Ok.

The database is now enjoying the sunshine in Florida.

The board software is in Utah.

I'm in Bondi.

Let's see how this works.