What happened today - an explanation. EVERYONE PLEASE READ Reply #15 – April 08, 2007, 10:37:42 PM 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? Quote Selected
What happened today - an explanation. EVERYONE PLEASE READ Reply #16 – April 08, 2007, 10:42:23 PM 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! Quote Selected
What happened today - an explanation. EVERYONE PLEASE READ Reply #17 – April 08, 2007, 11:04:03 PM I'll throw in a few bucks. Quote Selected
What happened today - an explanation. EVERYONE PLEASE READ Reply #18 – April 08, 2007, 11:04:17 PM 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. Quote Selected
What happened today - an explanation. EVERYONE PLEASE READ Reply #19 – April 08, 2007, 11:33:55 PM 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. Quote Selected
What happened today - an explanation. EVERYONE PLEASE READ Reply #20 – April 09, 2007, 12:16:25 AM I would/ or altleast my shop SpeedyDyno would be an advertiser if nessacery. Just let me know. Anything to help Quote Selected
What happened today - an explanation. EVERYONE PLEASE READ Reply #21 – April 09, 2007, 12:24:15 AM That's 2 advertisers. I'm sure Thundercats Electronixxx would be in too? Quote Selected
What happened today - an explanation. EVERYONE PLEASE READ Reply #22 – April 09, 2007, 12:28:08 AM Hell I'll paypal $60 I don't care. Quote Selected
What happened today - an explanation. EVERYONE PLEASE READ Reply #23 – April 09, 2007, 01:39:08 AM 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. Quote Selected
What happened today - an explanation. EVERYONE PLEASE READ Reply #24 – April 09, 2007, 03:39:04 AM Maybe start up a fund with seperate donations at catjam this year? Quote Selected
What happened today - an explanation. EVERYONE PLEASE READ Reply #25 – April 09, 2007, 07:13:33 AM When the board first moved over here there was a way to donate via Paypal. Quote Selected
What happened today - an explanation. EVERYONE PLEASE READ Reply #26 – April 09, 2007, 08:17:30 AM isnt the donation thing on erics site? Quote Selected
What happened today - an explanation. EVERYONE PLEASE READ Reply #27 – April 09, 2007, 09:43:46 AM Quote from: JeremyB;138969Why 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.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. Quote Selected
What happened today - an explanation. EVERYONE PLEASE READ Reply #28 – April 09, 2007, 09:47:30 AM 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. :) Quote Selected
What happened today - an explanation. EVERYONE PLEASE READ Reply #29 – April 09, 2007, 10:12:20 AM 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 :DReducing 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. Quote Selected
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