Site problems?

[Bud]

Is it just me or is anyone else experiencing occasional problems at the moment? Site not loading, slow etc?

[IntroSites]

Not noticed any problems, maybe its all your visitors looking for the hidden gifts!:D

[Bud]

Ah - that must be it!! :D

My master plan's been foiled! :eek:

[Confuscius]

My guess would be a localised MSN / Google spider frenzy - given that MSN is unpredictable and Googlebot has been taking a break for a PR update and it has got to catch up!

Paul

[Confuscius]

Hi Bud

I just noticed your a4u post - SW is running fine everywhere I have checked and a traceroute on your domain times out so it looks like your current hosting (which I assume is shared based on the number of sites on your IP) cannot cope with the spider traffic that a SW site eventually generates - you should consider moving to more suitable hosting. I would not be surprised if you are told soon that you are causing problems to others! I used to get these all the time!

I run VPS's (as does Andy now!) - I think your current host and my provider use the same source. About £20 per month for a basic VPS but it will still fall over on occasion because of a wild MSN or spider raid. One of my VPS was off for about 2 hours overnight and it is a top end one. The cost of hosting as a percentage of earnings is linear and also a low percentage, hopefully!

I hope this helps.

Paul

[Adrian]

Hi Guys,

I've investigated into this problem with our development team and it seems that there are no known problems with ShopWindow sites. We've checked our back-end stats over a period of time and they're spot on with trends (no unusual 'dips').

Bud, I think Paul may be onto something there, have you contacted your hosting company about this...?

Kind Regards,

Adrian

[Bud]

Thanks Paul & Adrain for your thoughts.

I'll look into it a bit more, but I have to say I'm not convinced.

The pages that won't load, or are r-e-a-l-l-y slow come from the shopwindow data retrieval. Other pages on the site (static html/php) still work fine. Also, other sites I've got hosted in the same reseller account haven't had any probelms either.

I''l try and keep you informed of any progress.

curiouser and curiouser :confused:

[Bud]

Update:

Host cannot find any problems.

6 shopwindow sites not working properly.
all 10 other (non-shopwindow) sites in same reseller package working fine.

This is not always a constant fault, but getting more and more frequent.

Can I ask a few of you to try www.theoffsetshop.co.uk and www.amberguardianrentals.com (non-shopwindow) to see how they load for you please?

Many thanks
Bud

[Adrian]

Hi Bud,

Been having a look over these sites for you and The Offset Shop seemed to work perfectly for my every time :confused: tried it a few times and its very fast at loading, even run a few searches - all very quick for me. The other site (amberguardianrentals) loads fine but all links return a 404 error???

Will take another look later today, anyone else getting any problems?

Kind Regards,

Adrian

[Confuscius]

Hi Bud

Loading fine for me! My guess has not changed as to what the problem is/was - too many requests creating a queue that leads to slower and slower response times - there are some greedy bots out there that can request multiple pages per second but they come and go.

Paul

[Bud]

Thanks Paul. It's typical isn't it, about 5 mins after my last post it all seemed to go well again and appears to have been ok since!

Regards the bots, if it was just the one site I'd tend to agree, but a couple of the sites (which have 0 traffic and aren't linked to yet - ie no spider activity at all) do the same which is confusing me.

[Confuscius]

It is highly likely that all accounts of the same type on one reseller will be affected - php sites will slow down more than plain html. I would be surprised if one of your SW site was OK in isolation from the rest - just points to a request queuing issue. Also, as your hosting resources will be limited then the effects can build up very quickly. If you have cpanel then check the service status when it is busy again and I bet the cpu figure will be greater than 1 - I have seen mine up to 12 cpu's before and the server still does not fall over just goes slower and slower!

I had to reboot a vps this morning because msn was hammering one particular site to server saturation point - rebooting cleared out all of the queue!

[Bud]

- ding -

The light's just gone on!

I see exactly what you mean now...I was a bit slow there :o

Thanks for the patient explanation, I'm sure you've been thinking "what a div!"

Currently at 4 cpus, so now I know what I need to do. Oh dear, more money -sigh-

[Confuscius]

Hi Bud

A basic VPS with WHM/cPanel at around £20 per month is a good starting point - disc space is not a big requirement, get the most guaranteed memory that you can - some will let you burst to a higher level, others won't! You will likely run out of memory before bandwidth before space - so make sure that if you need to upgrade in future then it should you be a case of changing your allocated package and paying a bigger bill!

PM Andy and I am sure that he will tell you of his experience of moving to a VPS - try eukhost.com, webhosting.ukcom or memset.com - all sites have a fair chunk of info and they are all set up differently BUT they all perform pretty well. Memset support is charged for but their servers are really reliable, webhosting is not charged for, servers not bad and they are pretty clued up on solving issues.

Also set up some remote monitoring so you are told when you have an issue! Allocate a certain percentage of your income to hosting and as you earn more increase your likelihood of NOT having problems by buying spare 'capacity' - I spend about 5% of income generated on hosting giving about a 1,900% return on my hosting investment!

Happy playtime!

Paul