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Yeah everything is working ok it just seems a little slow sometimes during the day. I've asked the host to investigate in case there's anything that can be done to help. Strange thing is the first week after changing it didn't happen at all.

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I'm using Chrome on my phone.

Was slow a couple of days ago. Nice and quick now tho

 

I must admit my laptop running win 10 and Firefox is well up to speed now whereas before the forum was snail pace.

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At least we are now in direct contact with the host and don't have to go through a middleman!

That's the key, be in charge of your own destiny as much as possible.

 

When we set up OOF back in 2006, we went with a UK based shared hosting provider, but got turfed off by them within 2 weeks for being too resource intensive (but then like most UK hosting providers, they were a bit mickey mouse) - remember that was when we were a brand new forum, so not that busy.  Ever since then, we took the decision to try to own as much as feasibly possible, and have manual fallbacks for those that aren't (mostly the static stuff on our site, as the software we use (initially YaBB, now Simple Machines Forum) allow us to host the dynamically generated stuff (like thread text) on our own servers, and the high bandwidth static stuff (images, icons, smilies, style sheets etc) on a shared hosting provider - and because its only static content coming from them, we are hit less by the slowdowns they suffer (being a shared provider).  Occasionally their end has a wobble, but we have that static content also hosted elsewhere, and its a very simple config to tell our software to grab the static stuff from an alternative location.

 

Obviously, occasionally our own dedicated server goes wrong as well, but that is in our own control, and most of the time we have another (virtual) server sat almost ready to take on the job.  Thus, we can only blame ourselves most of the time if things don't go to plan.

 

We have one critical item - connectivity - that is a single point of failure, and that is provided by (you'll think ironically) Zen Internet. Who I've always found responsive and technically decent and understanding.  But even if they can't fix that quickly, we run a medium length TTL on the domain, so we can quickly migrate elsewhere, and the Internet will find our new home within a few hours....   ...and when we migrate back, we would set our TTL to, say, 15mins, so we'd be discovered again almost immediately....   ….fortunately we have not suffered a big enough outage to have to warrant doing that, but we have tested it on a test domain, more than once ;)

 

 

Hope that gives you things to ponder over, and feel free to contact me privately if you need help and advice.

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The thing is WIM is such a small forum I don't think it warrants having a dedicated server. How much does it cost you to run your one, not just in electricity but time as well?

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The thing is WIM is such a small forum I don't think it warrants having a dedicated server. How much does it cost you to run your one, not just in electricity but time as well?

 

That's one for a private conversation. But we run OOF on a shoestring financially, and nowadays, apart from planning, I spend more time on the forum than in the back of it.

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As I said above the host are having an issue with one of their servers causing the intermittent slowness. They are upgrading hardware tomorrow so it should be up to full speed by the end of the week.

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  • 1 month later...

Sorry, not posted for a while, work have been demanding their tuppence worth from me!

 

But with the move, and the new software (that I'm still not convinced I like the theme of yet!), all the issues I was seeing, particularly when browsing from work, are resolved.

 

Excellent work Rich :)

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