Fox T-Bird/Cougar Forums

"Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.

Additionally, a 403 Forbidden error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.foxtbirdcougarforums.com (http://"http://www.foxtbirdcougarforums.com") Port 80"

Is all that would show up from 11AM to 4:30PM PST. I see no posts logged during that time either, so I am assuming it happened to everybody.

*EDIT BY THUNDER CHICKEN* I've explained it below, as well as provided some important site news. Please scroll down to my post.

I got it too

I couldn't log on either what's up with that?

I concur I couldnt get on.  But I also belong to another forum and My password doesnt work there anymore? Are the forums breaking down or something?

Me 2. I started a thread on it too. Mods please kill it...

Glitch happens. :dunno:

We should be grateful that we have this resource at our disposal and it costs us nothing.  Anytime the site goes down for a little bit, everyone gets on the bitch bandwagon.  It's irritating to me too, but these things happen.

Funny you should mention that, Brian...

It appears our little corner of the internet is a resource hog on its shared server, which is why we've had slowdowns in the past. Our hosting service provides plenty of bandwidth and storage space, but it apparently doesn't have a whole lot of horsepower (CPU cycles) at its disposal. Godaddy, our host, moved the whole shebang to a faster server today, which is why nothing worked (it came as a surprise to me, too - I got the email AFTER the site went down).

Unfortunately, the move to the faster server is only temporary - we have 30 days to make the site more efficient. After the 30 days we have a few choices:

1) Leave everything as it is, and the site will revert to being slow
2) Pay GoDaddy $60/month for a dedicated server
3) Move the whole shebang to another host.

2) and 3) both have their problems. To pay $60/month to host a site like this would be overkill - that $60/mo includes a dedicated server with a 150GB HDD, 2GB of RAM, and all kinds of bandwidth, but we only use about 1% of that now. We'd essentially be paying for a processor, as that would be the only advantage we'd have over the current situation. That, and I can't afford an extra $60/month, and would hate to charge for memberships to pay for it.

As for moving everything, in the future that may be an option, but right now we're paid up for 3 years (non-refundable) with GoDaddy. That is only part of the problem, however. The other part is the physical move. Remember last time, when we lost the whole attachment database? That could happen again. More importantly, though - I'm on dialup internet. Imagine trying to download, then upload, a gig of website through a 56k connection. The three years would be over before the download finished.

#1 looks to be the only viable option here, but there are some things that can be done to make it better. I will be going over some settings in the vBulletin control panel to try to optimize the system - the problem we're having is that vBuilletin is making too many calls to the database (where all the posts, attachments, images, etc are stored). I'm pretty sure I can change some settings to relieve some of this pressure. For example, limiting the size and number of attachments, as well as changing their storage type (right now they're stored in the database, I can change it to store them in a regular web folder). I'm also going to purge some inactive user accounts, and make other tweaks wherever I can.

I guess it all boils down to this: for the short term, we'll have to put up with a few bumps in the road, as I tweak things here and there trying to free up precious CPU cycles. AT the worst, after 30 days, we should e back to slightly faster than the site was before. At worst, we may have to come up with another host. One thing to look forward to: In 30 days we'll have another downtime just like today as they move us from the fast server back to the original. I'll keep you posted.

I'm gonna sticky this thread and change the title so others can see the score...

$60 per mounth doesn't sound that bad, but how much is that per member, per year? Just to throw that out?

Im just glad were back!!!!!!!!

I went through and deleted a bunch of old attachments, if everyone does this I'm sure it will help some.  I got rid of anything older than 2007.

Can you go back and delete old posts ( in my case, alot of usless stuff from the beginning) to make up some room too?

Fila that sounds more like "I made and ass out of myself if you delete them no one will ever know" LOL But if it helps do it. I love this place and would hate to lose it.

I'm not afraid to admit I made an ass of my self..... many, many times. But if it will help the site out.

just deleted all my old attachments, there weren't many but eh...

I've said it before, and I'll say it again:

Me, personally, I am MORE then willing to PAY for membership. I pay for NATO and TF and I'm here more then those 2 COMBINED.

On top of that, Aerobird Motorsports is MORE then willing to also pay, or even become an advertiser. Whatever it takes.

Take a look at http://www.ls1gto.com They are one of the webs largest car forums, in members, active members, attatchments, posts, hits, etc, etc. Their board is nearly identical and they have no membership fees. It is also one of the fastest sites on the net. They have sponsers, and the members support the sponsers. It is a very good arrangement on a very grand scale compared to us. TurboFord is great example of how not to do it. They have sponsers, fees, and donations, are on a slow setup, and don't allow attatchments.

So again, who do I make the check out to, and where do I send it?

though im a college student i gotta admit i would probably not like it a whole lot but i WOULD pay for this site. words cant express how valuable this place is to me. thats how you know you're on a good forum, when youd pay to be there!

I'll throw in a few bucks.

Carmen would it help if we killed or reduced signatures?  I'm thinking not because most are hosted off site at photobucket and such.  But even so some peoples signatures are a bit overwhelming.  Maybe reduce the size allowed to what antonio always seems to make his.  Small but big enough to get the point across.

Why was GoDaddy chosen if it, inherently, couldn't handle the load?

Why was the old DB lost? Or at least made unsearchable during the last transfer? I've been on several message boards that moved servers. Once they "repopulated" the DB, everything was hunky dory.

My post is meant to be read in a curious tone, not an accusatory one.

I would/ or altleast my shop SpeedyDyno would be an advertiser if nessacery.

  Just let me know.  Anything to help

That's 2 advertisers. I'm sure Thundercats Electronixxx would be in too? ;)

Hell I'll paypal $60 I don't care.

Is the 60 dollars ontop of what you're already paying?  If so i agree that's overkill. 

We should have a fund raiser to support the extra price for 3 years.  That way people arn't paying monthly and we get the faster service.

Maybe start up a fund with seperate donations at catjam this year?

When the board first moved over here there was a way to donate via Paypal.

isnt the donation thing on erics site?

A year ago, the old host (XL Internet) sent us sudden notification that we had less than a week to move the site because they were shutting down their servers. I had just moved my site to GoDaddy for hosting and had no issues. Carm and I searched for hosts; none offered the bang-for-the-buck that GoDaddy did. So we moved it there. Yes, it was in haste. Yes, our hands were (and still are) tied. We didn't know that GoDaddy has a reputation for long lag times when hosting message boards. I can't tell you how many times I've contacted them concerning our database connection. Of course, no problem was ever found on their end. The past few months they've been alright for the most part. But this latest situation is just another thing that has gone sour since our move over to GoDaddy. I love their hosting for my site. Obviously it's a different story when a message board is involved.

Far as the database goes...I can't really say what happened there either. We did the backup from XL's servers exactly the way it was supposed to go. Alex and I followed vBulletin's instructions to the T. We still had issues. (Personally, I've always felt that we need a totally fresh installation of the message board software, not a port over to a new server. That would probably eliminate most of the DB connection issues we've had. Of course, we'd lose all of the valuable information we've collected over the years if we do that). Any of the database issues, Alex should be able to answer better than I can.

At this point, I'm all for moving the board to another server and saying, "Screw GoDaddy, so what if we lose a few bucks." It's going to be more worth our time and money to seek out a more stable environment for our board. But that's just my vote.

It's obvious that you campers are not happy. And it's also obvious that we have some people here that are willing to financially help out with the move. So I don't see why we'd want to stay with GoDaddy as the host.

Keep godaddy or move it to a better server, as long as it stays up and running makes no difference to me. If you need cash to do it, either way, let me know. I'll contribute what I can.
 
Make it so. :)

Deleting old posts and attachments aren't going to help - this is not a bandwidth or storage space issue, it's a CPU usage issue. So 84Fila's early posts are there for all eternity :D

Reducing sig sizes would also not help directly because as CougarSE mentioned, the pics are usually hosted on a different site. It would help indirectly, though, as it would speed up loading of pages simply by having less data to load.

GoDaddy was chosen because that's where Eric had CoolCats hosted, and he was happy with them. GoDaddy was also chosen because at the time we were in a state of absolute panic. The company we WERE hosted with, XLInternet, was going tits-up and we had very little time to perform the move (this panicking is part of the reason we lost the attachments). I was literally blindisded by it - I got an email that simply said "Move your website while you still can, 'cuz we're going tits-up tomorrow". Eric, Baxo and I had to get things done quickly. GoDaddy has very good storage and bandwidth for a good price, but what we didn't count on was the CPU usage. The board software (vBulletin) is apparently a resource hog.


For those that don't understand: Our site is hosted on what's called a "Shared hosting" plan. These plans are generally fairly cheap, but the tradeoff is that several sites are hosted on the same computer. If one of those sites is particularly busy or makes a lot of calls to a database (such as this site) it slows every site down on the server. If you get two or more busy sites fighting for CPU cycles it can get pretty bogged down, which is what's happening here. The problem, when using a shared server, is that we have no way of knowing what or who we're sharing the server with. If it was just a couple of people with personal sites, or even small business sites, it would be OK. We might, though, be sharing a server with six other message boards, or a person/company trying to be the next eBay or YouTube.

A dedicated server, on the other hand, is a whole computer sitting in a server farm with nothing but an OS and our website on it. The hard drive, CPU, bandwidth, and memory of this machine are all ours. The tradeoff is that it is very expensive.

The dilemma we've got here is that our lil' messageboard is getting a bit too big for its britches, but it's still too small to justify a whole server for itself. While I can see a site like ls1gto.com being able to do it, they've got the advantage of having a larger advertising (and fan) base to help pay the bills. Our cars are forgotten. Offers from Mike and Greg aside, appreciated as they may be, we simply can't  get a bunch of advertisers here. Even vendors that make stuff that would fit our cars (like engine parts) would not even bother trying to target such a small audience.


Then we have to ask ourselves, "Would it all be worth it, anyway?"

Sometimes the site would slow down, sure, but it still worked, and it was free of advertising clutter. Oh yeah, and it was FREE. NO paid memberships. Everyone treated equal. Do we really want to give that up (and indeed, to go against a personal vow I made that I'd never charge for memberships or clutter the place with advertising) just to pick up a second or two each time a page loads?

Anyway, over the next little while, I am going to try some things to help lighten the load (apparently, switching the attachment storage type from "store in database" to "store in file system" makes a big difference). I will also be looking into alternatives. I've already found one possibility: It's called "Virtual dedicated server", and it's kind of a hybrid between what we've got now and what GoDaddy is trying to sell us for $69/month. This "Virtual dedicated server" shares the server like the plan we've got now, but it guarantees our site will have a certain amount of RAM and CPU processing power at at our disposal. It's also half the price of a real dedicated server, at $30/month.

For now, the key is to remember that we do have choices and we do have time (unlike the last move). There is no need to panic - the worst that might happen is that we'll go back to being as slow as before. We're not gonna disappear.

I think we'd all rather pay a few bucks a year than have the forum swarmed by adverts. No offense to those willing to 'sponsor', but one thing I really like about this place is you don't w it out to adds. It's more personal this way. With the amount of active members on here, it can't be more than $10-15 a year. (dontations, of course)

I read this site every day (it's one of my 5 "tabs") but I can't complain about the delays all that much. I click on "New Posts" and it takes perhaps 10-20 seconds to load. It's actually faster than the "Corral" which is a huge Mustang site (get supercharger info there). I am in the habit of clicking to other tabs while waiting for a page to load there. This place is in the middle speed wise, I really can't complain - though admittedly I do not post here as frequently as many...

It takes about 5 to load on my computer.  I letteraly would be at set one if not for this site. I can give up a few seconds of my life extra to get teh help that I may need

True enough. I never did think it was a slow site. But if it did become a problem, I'm sure we'd be able to do our part if asked.

I'm all for the Advertisers as Areobird Motersports defined it. I frequent the Cobra site http://www.ffcobra.com/ (http://"http://www.ffcobra.com/") more often than this one and it is advertiser supported and fast.
There is an un-invasive banner add across the top that cycles through the advertisers and also a Supporting advertisers page http://www.ffcobra.com/current_advertising.html (http://"http://www.ffcobra.com/current_advertising.html") makes for a nice directory to find what ya need, helpful, not intrusive.
Other than members wanting to sell personal items nobody is allowed to advertise without purchasing a banner.

I think sponsorship is a great way to go as long as it’s not intrusive to the members. And They way it’s done on the Cobra site it’s not.

Hey Thunderchicken, I do web development for a living and I can give you a few points of advice.

First Godaddy sucks.  We used to run a lot of our clients site with them and had nothing but issues when the site got beyond a low hit basic html page. Got so bad we dropped them all together.

A great budget host that I would recommend and that I use is Dreamhost - http://www.dreamhost.com/  Low prices and very forum and PHP/MySQL friendly.

Another thing to try if you haven't already is login to AdminCP and optimize all MySQL tables for database.

Also I have had issues in the past with using uploaded Avatars.  You may want to experiment with turning this off and seeing if your server load goes down.

I am on a broadband connection and if you need help moving/backing up the database let me know as I would be happy to help, I do this stuff all the time.

Whatever you guys need to do, do.

Have you considered an optional paid membership?

For instance, offer paying members space to upload photos and attachments while non-paying members will be required to find another hosting site such as imageshack to link attachments.

Or just rule out uploading attachments all together. If anyone wants to upload images, make everyone load them on an image hosting site. I do that pretty much all the time and it really isn't inconvenient.

I know practically nothing about how these boards are set up and what you can/cannot do.

Some say it's slow, meh, I never really noticed. Like stated before, I appreciate this site and the amount of work you all put into it. Whatever you need to do; keep it the same, charge membership, whatever, you won't hear any complaints out of me.

i'm feeling the optional membership idea. ad-less for members, ads for non-payers?

Something NATO does, is a raffle.

Theyll take a valuable item, sell a certain amount of tickets at 10 bucks a pop, draw a random number, and put the proceeds into an account for the forum.

Every one of us has something valuable that we'll never use, that would probably work out well.

What ever you need to do I am all for it. I pay for my membership at TRS and have never looked back.

Beside I don't just stay on one page so load time isn't a problem. That and TV on the computer helps.

The NATO raffles work very, very well. Again, I'd be more then happy to donate some raffle items.

It isn't the "slow" that's the problem, it's when the board "freezes" and then the horrible stuff like what happened the other day.

I have no issues with the current (although ocasionally slow) speed.

Advertisers is a thumbs down,  but thats just my opinion.  Thanks to the board members who offered though.

I have no issues paying dues personally, although I do understand some have limited funds, and that our commitment is to help all who love these cars regardless of if they join for a fee or not, therefore the membership thing may help but hinder our overall cause.  Personally  I am in a position to shell out a few $ if it helps,  but the raffle may be better suited to letting those who can spend pay and those who can not pay abstain.  The side benefit of the raffle is someone gets something cool.


My 2 cents  for what it is worth

I'd be willing to pay two months worth in trade for making a new rule that new guys have to bring chips and dip. :D

I'm totally against this.  I won the raffle over at TCCOA last year in november, the one that was supposed to be for Hurricane Katrina, still haven't gotten my ****ing Laptop yet.  The  part about it is "Sir" Will has had the  thing at his office since before xmas.

Hell, I no longer even own a T-bird, but would be willing to pay if it were something like 10-15 bucks.  Honestly, I've never really thought it was slow.  I'm a super tab surfer, so I've constantly got another 3 or 4 sites open to read while other stuff is loading.

I would be willing to pitch in to help keep this site. (my favorite)

Plus, I have no problem with advertisers paying for ads. (as long as they relate to the fox ThunderCats.)

I'm a little late, but I'd pay for a membership as well. I currently have two memberships at other forums and I don't frequent them nearly as often as this one.

One cool thing about memberships is that you can get sweet perks like an increased amount of PM storage, and the ability to delete your posts, or lock your own thread... little things like that can go a long way. It doesn't really have to be anything of monetary value.

And even if there's aren't any perks, I'd still pay for a membership.
 :)

I agree. I think we should do this. Stuff/parts for us might not be a bad thing.

I can host it...... for free

Server is a Dell Poweredge Dual PIII 800's with 1gig of ram and its own dedicated UPS. Connected to a T1 line. At the moment this would be the only site on that server.

It will be sitting here.

Wow, now thats quite an offer.

I would hit that.

I'm not much of a computer guy, but........wow.

Holy cow! That's pretty cool Claude!

Dayum son! :D

Now that is one nice RACK. And i'm not talking about your ies! LOL

To quote a man amongst men, Meh! I've seen better *turns around to look behind me* !

[Constructive criticism]
Seriously, I don't believe that is going to be enough horsepower to handle this server. Show me at least a dual core Xeon with at least 2gb's of ram minimum with 2 hard drives in a Raid 1 config, and possibly a Dedicated T1/T3 or optical connection, and then I'd say go for it. Mind you I can not find any info on what our server is  hosted on spec wise over @ GoDaddy, but I gotta feeling it's more than that.
 
 Now, on the other hand, that server would be good for some sort of Cache server, either for photo/attachment storage, or if part of the board's database could be linked to that server to help with load times. If that idea is viable, then I think it be foolsih to not take advantage of that resource.
[/Constructive criticism]

Beyond this, (and I may have already stated this before) I also am willing to pay a membership fee, or offer a donation,  to be apart of this site.

Still mulling possibilities. No offense, Claude, but I'll have to decline your offer. Price isn't the issue - reliability is. I'd gladly pay more for hosting knowing that the host is still gonna be there tomorrow (we already went through the ordeal of having the host disappear once, and I never want to do it again). I've actually been checking things out and Dreamhost (suggested by someone in this thread and by baxo in another) seems to be a good deal and a fairly stable company.

So after that 60 days this site is going to become slow?  Are we on a dedicated server right now (for these 60 days)?

Meh have it youre way.
 
And with the usual 20 people logged into this board that machine would do fine.  There is no way in hell you're going to get a dedicated T1 line for this website.  Hello $600 a month hosting fee's.
 
Oh by the way....  A raid 1 array will not improve "horsepower".
 
Yeah GoDaddy's server might be more "horsepowery" but it also is hosting upwards of 10 websites.

;)

I haven't seen many problems lately except that one day.
I donate to any cause.

Sammy, do you do regular backups? Having your databases disappear is not good, regardless if the host left, or you transferred hosts. Some data loss may occur if something happens before the next backup, but this should not be a "problem". It's easy to backup vB's database, especially if you have ssh access to the mysql server.

Doing regular backups, and locating a copy offsite, is something that might be looked into if this is a problem.

That said, I share some of nirvanagod's comments. I've got some experience with vBulletin and mysql. vBulletin isn't exactly kind to servers. I'm not suggesting CougarSE's hardware is not good enough for a relatively small board like this, but may not be the best avenue, in my opinion.

Well go carm looks like we need a ****ing Linux cluster in our own data center to run this board with an average of 20 or so connections.......

I guess having came from 2.8 dual xenon processors with 4GB of memory last year that powered an active vB forum has me biased when it comes to vB running on servers and what is "good". Once again, I stated this site is relativity small and I wasn't suggesting that your hardware wasn't good enough. However, I know vB and mysql aren't gentle on servers and being cheap often leads to those same customers asking why their forum runs so slow or is nearly inaccessible due to server load.

Lets keep the cat fight to the birds!!!!

One question, why not use a colocation service like,
http://www.rackmounted.com/colo.php ?