We're Back

[David]

Hi! If you are seeing this then we are officially back!

We switched our hosting from a shared server to a dedicated server. In other words, we aren't going to be hogging resources and get our own. This should fix the problem but could potentially create its own string of problems.

Please bare with us as we figure things out. Since we are relying on one server now instead of many we aren't sure what high activity will mean when it comes to relying on just one server. Please be patient with us as we test it and see if this will work out for us as intended.

[David]

Update on What's been up (in case you were curious):

We've been running BB on shared servers since we started britneyboards.org. We ran into problems because BB tends to be a resource whore and got kicked from our first server, godaddy.com.

We switched to a shared server on mediatemple.net because they handle resource management better. Under normal times this has been perfect and we never even came close to going over. mediatemple can deal really well with sudden bursts. This month with promotion occuring and the new album leaking we had a burst but the burst never went down. We weren't in danger of being closed down (yay mediatemple) but we were in danger of overshooting our alotted gpu's (1000 given to us per month). BB was on board to end up costing us about double what we pay now for it. We closed BB to avoid this overage.

Over the break I brought up the idea of switching to a dedicated server since we all know this problem was going to happen again in december and probably for the next few months. For $10 more Rapz and I agreed to test out mediatemple's dedicated virtual servers. This removes the dependency on the gridservers. I was waiting to get closer to the end of the billing month (11-27 is when new billing month starts) to set up the new server. I've spent all night setting everything up but BB appears to be back. The only snag is that the domain isn't directing to the new server for everyone. I had to manually create the database, ftp, etc and figure out how to edit the settings on everything to make everything fit together. There MAY still be kinks.

I do not know how a dedicated server will handle the high traffic. Our bandwidth limit is well about what we normally use as is our disk space. The resources is where our problem has always been so we'll see how one server all to ourself will hand the demand.

This is a period of testing. The dedicated server may not work out for us. Please bare with us as we test things out.

[David]

so today BB was down for a few hours until i reset the server.

Basically, the site closed because too many resources were being used for it's liking. Yay for protection from overusage (it kicks itself off instead of charging us). it's an easy fix. I'll work on optimizing the server in the next few days. If after that the problem persists then we're going to probably add ads and take donations. We'll worry about that later. :)