Re: Downtime Over
 

The very act of donation is an honorable one, and the fact (yes, fact...I don't need to see oxygen to prove I can breathe it) that Bailopan has been giving so much of his time, money, talents and dedication to this community is proof enough of his honor. Honor doesn't come with papers; one either has it or doesn't, and I believe we have been provided with excellent examples of both of those scenarios.

Re: Downtime Over
 

Worst debate I've seen on these forums. Pointless as well. If you don't respect dvander's method, id suggest you cope with it or as people say "get the fuck out"

Re: Downtime Over
 

The fact Bailopan spent so much time doesn't make him untouchable. All humans do make errors.

Re: Downtime Over
 

No doubt this has been looked at (I've brought this up in IRC in the past. I didn't have much to answer, though. Hopefully someone else can add to this, I personally hate hosting websites). Why not take a look at another webserver? Apache hasn't been king for a while (hell, ages). Considering the AM box is hosting at the very least Seven websites. I, among with many others have had much better success using Lighty instead of Apache (although I've never tested it on anything of this magnitude before). Cherokee seems to be the next runner up, surpassing Lighty and NGINX. Then there's LiteSpeed, but it isn't free (well it is, but the free version is crippled) so who cares about that.

Sure, Apache is easy to configure. However, when you're running a lot of websites. At the end of the day you may as well go the extra mile and just get the configuration part over with. Take the SourceMod approach over using Mani Admin Plugin.

The only error Bailopan has made was stating that he's asking for less money then is actually required to run AM monthly. There's no Zionist conspiracy going on, which has been stated a number of times now.

Re: Downtime Over
 

If you don't mind me asking, why are you using php_fcgid instead of say, modphp? I've heard of crazy problems with fcgid, but I've never heard of that kinda stuff with modphp before.

Also, I would suggest looking at amazon ec2 too. It has some advantages, like it is better able to scale, and you wouldn't have to worry about drive failure anymore. Also, if you buy a reserved instance (requires paying for one year up front), it is much, much, cheaper than buying hourly based on usage. Anyway, not sure if it's right, but it would let you scale better and you wouldn't have to worry about hardware failures quite as much anymore.

Re: Downtime Over
 

Bail-
For curiousity sake, what OS is the server running on? Also, what exactly are you using mod_fcgid for that would make it more useful than doing a mod_php+eAccelerator or suphp (for security) setup? If you suspect load issues that aren't in short spikes, I'd probably do a cron job to check the load or use something like MRTG to monitor load, memory usage, process count, etc.

Earlier, Litespeed was mentioned. I've heard many good things about it, but you'd probably go for the 2-core version which would run you at:
$46.00 USD Monthly
$499.00 USD Annually
$799.00 USD Lifetime ($149/year every year after the first for updates/support)
Litespeed will be pretty much wasted money however if the webserver isn't a big issue.

You mentioned using RAID. What kind of RAID (and will it be hardware or software)? Also, using RAID isn't an alternative in any form to doing backups (I believe you realize this already, but just putting it out there). It'd be nice to have a drive on the server dedicated to backups even if you're rsyncing them to an offsite computer as well or something. Since your provider seems to be Softlayer, I don't believe they sell HDs in one-time fees. Perhaps that's something you can talk them into though since that fee can quickly build up over time and I'm sure the server's here to stay for awhile.

It's hard to really suggest much else at the moment without getting a lot more info or seeing everything first hand. Just glad everything's back up!

Re: Downtime Over
 

Ouch Drama.
I have a dream...
That the world could live free of drama!


I use vps servers for my backups.
They are very cheap and affordable and reliable.
If you need to look at backup options i would recommend the WebHostingTalk community.

And for Dravu's post
Munin is a great monitoring tool.

Re: Downtime Over
 

Kyle12: Another webserver is an option, but we have a lot of custom apache gunk including .htaccess usage that we'd have to make sure can be ported first. If we can't get the 500 errors resolved soon, that's our path.

infinite recursion, Dravu: There's some history to that decision. fastcgi has some advantages, the biggest at the time was security. It isolates the processes per-vhost. mod_php is another last-resort, but we have no idea if it'd actually fix the root problem.

Dravu: Yes, we'll be using munin soon. We're using software RAID until we can figure out what to do next. I chose software because it was cheaper and I liked not having vendor lock-in. (Yup, we had off-site backups too, but they were partial, but that's why we're in this mess.)

The problem with our provider right now aren't technical. I think if we switch providers, it will be colo. But we'll see. We need to have things fixed first before we start evaluating where to go next.

Re: Downtime Over
 

Update: I've dropped off the dead drive at a data recovery lab. They'll send me an evaluation and estimate tomorrow.

Re: Downtime Over
 

What little (and I mean LITTLE) credibility you may have had, just went out the window when you pointed to GOOGLE for help on configuring high load servers. Seriously? You demand someone point out why your "solution sucks" and then you reference google. You're just spouting off non sense for the sake of it.


P.S. Keep up the good work BP and the rest of the team.