Re: French Car Forum - Hosting Problems
Posted: Mon Jan 18, 2010 12:27 pm
Hi John,xmexclusive wrote:Hi All
I have been watching Jims difficulties with keeping FCF alive and running while the service provider consistantly fails to deliver reliability.
Without Jims structured preplanning and time consuming routine Forum maintenance and back up they would have lost significant data from the site rather than the odd post each time it goes down. It seems that the help desk does not get told what the engineers are going to do to try to rectify things.
This is with a commercial service supplier selected carefully on good technical considerations and not the lowest price going.
So pleased that Jim is able and willing to put this effort in to keep a key source our cars technical information on line.
This episode reminds me that our own forum is similarly reliant on a single individual for all aspects of Forum delivery and maintenance.
Something that in the longer term we should perhaps review.
I had thought that before we got much bigger we should move our Forum to a commercial host.
Now I am not at all sure about making that change.
John
A very good point, and one I've been thinking about since we had that almost week-long outage in December. I've long been considering moving the forum to a commercial host, but my confidence in this has been shaken by the saga of FCF and Webfusion, a company whose services I have deployed numerous times for my own customers, usually with very good results. I know that any company can suffer problems from time to time, but in Jim's case he's had more than his fair share of problems with them lately.
Before this, I would have always recommended Webfusion to people, now, I'm not so sure.
There are of course other providers with a good reputation, but the costs can be significantly higher in some cases. I'm not saying that quality isn't worth paying for, its just if we did go down that route we would need to consider voluntary funding of some kind, like a few people were offering in the threads following the outage. I had meant to address this at the time, but due to work, and then being quite unwell for the past few weeks, hadn't had the chance yet.
Rest assured, if we did goto a commercial provider, I would be maintaining local backups of all data, in the event of a catastrophic failure, it could again be run from home, however with the nature of the internet and DNS being what it is, any such changes in server location would take days to propagate, by which time any hosting problem is likely to have been resolved anyway, catch 22. Of course the likelihood of getting such a continual succession of problems like FCF have had is slim, but it's always a possibility.
Ironically, the disadvantage of having the site hosted at home, is also its biggest advantage, in that the server is there and accessible, and someone from our ranks can get their hands on it and the data, rather than being reliant on the support staff of a hosting company.
The connection the site is currently on, is cable, and is quite reliable. I wouldn't be quite so confident about it if it was ADSL based, as that technology is inherently more prone to instability due to it's design and limitations, but nothing is infallible, and it has gone down once or twice (albeit for quite brief periods, luckily).
One thing that definitely does need addressed is having at least one other person with administrative access that can sort things out in my absence. At the end of the day, if I drop dead tomorrow, the site should be perfectly placed to continue as normal. I'm looking into finding someone we can trust, who has the necessary IT skills to maintain the thing in my absence, permanent or not. That definitely does need sorted out, regardless of what we do with the hostage situation.
Ciarán
