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Domain PHP/Vanilla issues?

Andy KAndy K ✭
edited July 2006 in Vanilla 1.0 Help
Hi all, something weird happened today at my normally decent provider. I've been running Vanilla for months now, and Vanilla 1.0 since like that day after it became general availability. Suddenly, today, my provider's provider suspends my account, citing "php overload; 57 processes" or something (this is secondhand from My provider, and we're seeing if the main provider can provide us with anything specific, like which php codes were tying things up, etc). Anyway, they had a DB crash and the like. I ran into my site to turn off Who's Online and Notify Me, thinking those are, aside from the core files themselves, likely to cause DB load. Has anyone else been getting this kind of thing from their provider? My provider is generally decent, but in some ways they have that "turn it all off rather than fine-tune and pinpoint", so I'm thinking of taking my Vanilla forum (now quite popular!) to another provider. Anyone recommend a large, inexpensive host that has given you no flak for having a large BB? What I'm looking from people is: 1) Average bandwidth traffic per day or month to your Vanilla BB. (mine is about 10gb, 400-500mb/day) Without this info, I can't determine if I'll see the same problems if I change hosts. If you have more traffic than me, then I'll totally keep an open ear! 2) Recommendations with that in mind to a good provider. I'm peeking at Dreamhost, because lots of my friends had success there. But I'm very open to suggestions.

Comments

  • MinisweeperMinisweeper New
    I've been hosting blizehs forum (~30gig a month transfer) with no troubles whatsoever for a couple of months now. Though if you're not in the UK I'm probably not ideal for you. The last US host i used was linode but that's not really ideal for someone in your situation. You could also, ofcourse, wait for mark to launch vanillaforums and get your hosting off him...
  • Andy KAndy K ✭
    I'm getting more followup recommendations to: Dreamhost Hostway iPowerweb Dreamhost is the most likely at this point, but I'm just throwing a net out there to cast for Feedback. Anyone have bad experiences with any of these? Thanks! -Andy
  • 3stripe3stripe ✭✭
    Dreamhost works for me. 20gbs space and 1tb of bandwith!!!!!!! And that's the cheapest account. So long as you are prepared for slightly more downtime than you would get on more expensive hosting, it's fine and dandy. They have removed restrictions on CPU minutes as well now I believe...
  • Andy KAndy K ✭
    Oops, nevermind guys, I'm sold: I just found out from Google that the storage hardware that Dreamhost runs on comes from my beloved company (rhymes with PetSlap), so I'm gonna roll with them. If I see any weirdness with "php performance" with Dreamhost, I'll let y'all know. Thanks! -Andy
  • MarkMark Vanilla Staff
    That's really strange. They say that not closing the db connection is okay with PHP, but I wanted Vanilla to be clean, so the last thing every page does is unload all of the objects and connections in the context object.

    I'd say it's more likely that you're sharing a server with a bunch of other sites and maybe one of the other sites had some funky stuff going on. Esp since I've never had a problem like that and this is a very, very busy forum.
  • Andy KAndy K ✭
    Hey Mark, thanks for the input. Here's what happened: 1) Provider shut down account (root domain). 2) We looked into it, and turned the account back on. 3) Very shortly after, using what tools I cannot tell, their "php geiger counter" started spiking again. We disabled my account. 4) I went into the vanilla subdomain root folder for my forum, backed up everything, and removed everything in that folder so that Vanilla wouldn't load, replacing it with an index.html ("site down thx"). 5) We brought the account back online, and no spikes, even an hour later (with all my other subdomains on). I'm very sure that I'm sharing the server with many other sites, and there might be something that's playing off another site, but it looks limited to my Vanilla installation. With that down and everything else up, their php/db servers don't spike. I'm just going to backup the db, export, and import into a new DB when I change webhosts for that subdomain, probably this evening. I love my current provider in other respects but I have no intention of leaving this BB down forever (or moving to phpBB or the like). -Andy
  • 3stripe3stripe ✭✭
    edited July 2006
    Did you have any other extensions running?
  • gigingergiginger New
    I'll put a shout in for Dreamhost too. If you do have any problems with your software then rather than shutting it down or closing your account they'll work through it with you and will quite happily admit if it's a config issue at their end or something you've got ticked in your options etc;
  • RoguefoxxRoguefoxx
    I have to say I've been very pleased with Dreamhost so far... no real issues so far. Although they are VERY large and if you need great personal customer support then they probably aren't your cup of tea.
  • deeldeel New
    dreamhost seems to be down right now.
  • 3stripe3stripe ✭✭
    yes. it is. i was just about to upload some tasty treats and everything's ka-boom.
  • Andy KAndy K ✭
    edited July 2006
    Yeah, that was kind of a forboding sign. I have my credit card ready, all set to fly, and ... boom. :-)

    However, I noticed that my friends who have sites hosted with Dreamhost are still up, so it just looks like someones probably playing DOS-Att@ck3r on their main site.

    Thanks again for the recs, folks.

    Next issue will be setting up at the new host, and migrating all my MySQL data over (I'm pretty savvy with setups, but no real experience with DBs, so this will be my first real migration). Yum!

    -Andy

    Edit:

    Did you have any other extensions running?

    Yeah, just about ALL of them. :-) Seriously, there's maybe like 10-15 extensions available at Add-Ons that I Didn't Add On. I figured on popping off the two likely PHP-killers, "Notify Me" and "Who's Online Now", but even with those off my provider was seeing those mysterious "spikes".
  • lamentlament ✭
    I have to say I've been very pleased with Dreamhost so far... no real issues so far.

    yeah same here, although they're having network issues right now and all of my sites are down. :(

    The other day they sent me an email stating that they had indexed one of my db tables:

    Please be sure to index your tables properly - you had a query running that was way more innefficient than it had to be - it went from checking
    over 2000 entries each time to under 25

    (I'm running punbb on another site, and this private message mod that i installed years ago was never indexed..oops!)
This discussion has been closed.