Boss-Hog
01-20-2011, 03:08 PM
Hi all,
I'm hoping some people read this post and can offer a viable solution(s) to the problem we find my site faced with. My co-admin and I have been with HostPC for seven to eight years and always received top notch service from the then owner at reasonably affordable prices. He let us know when we were generating enough traffic to warrant a move to a more powerful server and we generally trusted his advice. Well, as many of you know, HostPC was sold several months back, which I just found out about when trying to get to the bottom of the problem I'm about to describe and it's left us with a dilemma.
For the past two or three months, our site performance has gradually gotten noticeably worse - pages load slower, generic database errors are now becoming prevalent, etc. We currently run vBulletin version 3.8.6 with the latest patches. Since I did not know my hosting company was sold, I attempted to contact the former owner, as we've always done, for help with the problem, but because of the sale, he of course did not respond. All I'm trying to say with this is that it's been going on for quite some time now, but now it's to the point that our site (redszone.com) is barely usable and at times, it isn't. When I opened a support ticket and described the problem, I was told the problem is twofold: 1). our database is far too big (an example cited was a 1.2 GB Post table) and 2). our current traffic far exceeds the specifications of the high-end shared server that our site currently resides on. Specifically, I was told that the MySQL levels far exceed normal usage of a shared hosting account and that recent changes that were made per user (10 simultaneous sql connections per second) further restrict the site from working as normal. I don't know if this is verbatim or an exaggeration for effect, but we were quoted as we currently have 50+ visitors per second with each page trying to do 5+ SQL queries.
As far as the first problem, that's easy enough for me to take care of if I could get the prune posts function to work, but only a very small handful of posts are actually pruned before the operation times out. On a similar note, I can't even make a reliable backup for my own peace of mind because the operation obviously times out within AdminCP or phpMyAdmin and as far as I know, since we're on a shared server, we do not have SSH access. That I can not currently backup our database is very troubling.
As far as the second option goes, we're attempting to be sold on a virtual private server or dedicated server. When I asked which VPS would accommodate our current traffic levels, I was told the most expensive one on this page (VPS-4). I don't know enough about this stuff to realize if the most expensive VPS is truly necessary to handle our traffic or a less expensive VPS would suffice; hence, I'm posting this message here. If you don't mind, please check out the page I linked above and if someone could explain whether VPS-4 or a dedicated server sounds truly necessary, I'd really appreciate it. I imagine that I will need to provide some site statistics in order to assist with that advice, but I'm not really sure what I need to provide, so if you can tell me what I'm looking for within our statistics, I should be able to provide that. Any advice you can offer to get our site running functionally again, regardless of the option (moving to a different server, hosting company, etc.) would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.
I'm hoping some people read this post and can offer a viable solution(s) to the problem we find my site faced with. My co-admin and I have been with HostPC for seven to eight years and always received top notch service from the then owner at reasonably affordable prices. He let us know when we were generating enough traffic to warrant a move to a more powerful server and we generally trusted his advice. Well, as many of you know, HostPC was sold several months back, which I just found out about when trying to get to the bottom of the problem I'm about to describe and it's left us with a dilemma.
For the past two or three months, our site performance has gradually gotten noticeably worse - pages load slower, generic database errors are now becoming prevalent, etc. We currently run vBulletin version 3.8.6 with the latest patches. Since I did not know my hosting company was sold, I attempted to contact the former owner, as we've always done, for help with the problem, but because of the sale, he of course did not respond. All I'm trying to say with this is that it's been going on for quite some time now, but now it's to the point that our site (redszone.com) is barely usable and at times, it isn't. When I opened a support ticket and described the problem, I was told the problem is twofold: 1). our database is far too big (an example cited was a 1.2 GB Post table) and 2). our current traffic far exceeds the specifications of the high-end shared server that our site currently resides on. Specifically, I was told that the MySQL levels far exceed normal usage of a shared hosting account and that recent changes that were made per user (10 simultaneous sql connections per second) further restrict the site from working as normal. I don't know if this is verbatim or an exaggeration for effect, but we were quoted as we currently have 50+ visitors per second with each page trying to do 5+ SQL queries.
As far as the first problem, that's easy enough for me to take care of if I could get the prune posts function to work, but only a very small handful of posts are actually pruned before the operation times out. On a similar note, I can't even make a reliable backup for my own peace of mind because the operation obviously times out within AdminCP or phpMyAdmin and as far as I know, since we're on a shared server, we do not have SSH access. That I can not currently backup our database is very troubling.
As far as the second option goes, we're attempting to be sold on a virtual private server or dedicated server. When I asked which VPS would accommodate our current traffic levels, I was told the most expensive one on this page (VPS-4). I don't know enough about this stuff to realize if the most expensive VPS is truly necessary to handle our traffic or a less expensive VPS would suffice; hence, I'm posting this message here. If you don't mind, please check out the page I linked above and if someone could explain whether VPS-4 or a dedicated server sounds truly necessary, I'd really appreciate it. I imagine that I will need to provide some site statistics in order to assist with that advice, but I'm not really sure what I need to provide, so if you can tell me what I'm looking for within our statistics, I should be able to provide that. Any advice you can offer to get our site running functionally again, regardless of the option (moving to a different server, hosting company, etc.) would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.