Another Update
After waiting several more days for CSoft to respond - through which time my site remained down - I lost patience and decided to change hosts.
Stuff began coming back online today. All data requests (for pages, posts, etc - anything from page.cgi) are responding, albeit without pretty CSS formatting. All redirects (edurss02.cgi) are functioning again. All archive pages (that's about 8,000 pages, mostly OLDaily and Edu_RSS archives).
Oh, and hey - the server isn't crashing. There are no runaway perl scripts, even though I'm using exactly the same code. The site is responding nicely, so far (knock on wood, etc) despite being hit pretty hard by the search engines (I found that Yahoo has a nice robots.txt command to slow down its slurping; nothing from Google though).
What's next? I need to get the contents of the /files directory uploaded - that's my biggest gap at the moment. Some of the smaller directories as well. I won't be replacing the massive /photos directory, but I will write some redirects to Flickr (I get about three hits a month on those, so I'm not worried). Then I need to get the newsletters back up and running.
It just goes to show - sometimes you can plan something for a month, have it crash and burn, and start over from scratch working on the fly and do the same thing in three days. That's life on the internet.
The people at ev1servers.net have been, I might add, very responsive and helpful.
- Ben Werdmuller said... I've had nothing but good experiences with ev1servers.net for colocation.
Stuff began coming back online today. All data requests (for pages, posts, etc - anything from page.cgi) are responding, albeit without pretty CSS formatting. All redirects (edurss02.cgi) are functioning again. All archive pages (that's about 8,000 pages, mostly OLDaily and Edu_RSS archives).
Oh, and hey - the server isn't crashing. There are no runaway perl scripts, even though I'm using exactly the same code. The site is responding nicely, so far (knock on wood, etc) despite being hit pretty hard by the search engines (I found that Yahoo has a nice robots.txt command to slow down its slurping; nothing from Google though).
What's next? I need to get the contents of the /files directory uploaded - that's my biggest gap at the moment. Some of the smaller directories as well. I won't be replacing the massive /photos directory, but I will write some redirects to Flickr (I get about three hits a month on those, so I'm not worried). Then I need to get the newsletters back up and running.
It just goes to show - sometimes you can plan something for a month, have it crash and burn, and start over from scratch working on the fly and do the same thing in three days. That's life on the internet.
The people at ev1servers.net have been, I might add, very responsive and helpful.
Well, this is odd because csoft has always been pretty responsive to me. But good for you if you found a better match. Myself, I changed provider 3 times before settling on csoft.
ReplyDeleteIt does seem to me, however, that ev1servers.net is a far more higher end provider than csoft.net. So, is it a fair comparison? Well, if you want top notch quality hosting and are willing to pay what ev1servers.net asks, that's fine. I pay 25$/month for my csoft account. From the look of it, you pay at least 69$/month for your account.
As for not having rogue scripts, note that ev1servers.net offers you 512 MB of dedicated memory at the least. You have to do lots of Perl scripting to run out of memory in this realm!!! The csoft guys will never let you use that much memory unless you take a dedicated server (40$/month). So it is still entirely possible that you have crazy scripts eating away memory, but you simply went back to throwing lots of hardware at the problem.
Is this wrong? Heck no! But it is possible that with some fine tuning, you could get away with less expensive hosting. Then again, maybe not. And considering what your time is worth, you might be better off never trying to discover whether your scripts are actually lean and mean or not.
Now, what's interesting is that you have at least 80 GB of storage. That's no nearly infinite storage, and it is puny if you consider that google video and youtube will let you upload several 100 GB videos, but that's why too much storage for text!
Stephen,
ReplyDeleteI am so pleased to see your web site back up running.
Happy New Year.
I for one have missed snatching at your swinging coat tail. I am sure that many others feel the same.
Impressive Stephen.
ReplyDeleteNicely composed post as is the oil quantification lymeric.
I'm a ludite when it comes to script and composing anything with it. An iscript is about as complicated as it gets.
I pay $120 AUD per year for aomething that dosent look like it will ever run out of room - servage.net.
Perl is as close as it gets for me to the shiny white gates of coding hell.