Free at Last!

Scott Hardie | September 29, 2008
If you've been paying attention to the state of this site for a while, you've noticed the outages, the weird glitches, the "account suspended" warnings. I've put up with an awful webhost for a year and a half because every time an incident happened, I was too tired or busy to undertake finding a new one, or my research and testing with new hosts never went long enough to find a suitable replacement.

When I woke up on Saturday morning and looked at the site, there it was again: "Account Suspended." No notice, no explanation. I had no FTP or database access to get in and change anything. When I called tech support, they told me my scripts were a drain on their system (duh) and to "run them less often." It took another ninety minutes, but they eventually restored my site. I really like a webhost that solves a problem by completely shutting down my site, turning off my access, and telling my users I'm some kind of deadbeat, without even contacting me about it. This has been without a doubt the worst hosting company I've ever used.

But this time was different: It happened at the beginning of a weekend when I didn't have other commitments, giving me two whole days to replace the bastards at long last. It took all weekend and into midday today, and the site was regrettably offline for a big part of that time, but at last we are free! You're reading this from goo.tc's new webhost, on a much more powerful server. This webhost is still likely to have some problems (I have yet to work with one that doesn't), but I think the days of aggravating outages, crashing scripts and weird glitches are behind us. The site seems faster here, too, and there are a number of nice shortcuts on the back-end that will reduce overhead for my coding.

That said, I'm still working on getting everything uploaded and configured correctly. Support scripts that maintain the database won't be running until tonight, so there may be a few weird numerical issues. I'm still uploading the last few images now. If you encounter any definite errors, such as a crashing script, page not found, missing image, or other oddity, please let me know so I can look into it.

Many thanks for your patience throughout this mess, and a special thanks to those who wrote me messages of support over the weekend. This crap is such a drain of energy that could be better put into adding new content to the site (not to mention doing something healthier offline), but it's the only way to keep this behemoth site running.

Scott Hardie | September 29, 2008
The new goo is up. There will not be free cards in the Card Exchange today. Concerts don't seem to be working for me at the moment, but unfortunately I can't fix them until tonight, sorry.

Scott Hardie | September 30, 2008
Concerts should be fixed. There was another problem with random page whiteouts for me, which I think is also fixed. Please let me know if you find other issues.

Steve West | September 30, 2008
I can't get the page to start a themed concert to open. Don't think it's my connection.

Amy Austin | September 30, 2008
Yeah, I'm having troubles, too... but I thought it was just repetitive timeouts, which I just sent an e-mail about. And, of course, right after I sent it, I'm back on...

Amy Austin | September 30, 2008
Was about to say... "well, sort of... if this comment will ever submit!"

Scott Hardie | September 30, 2008
The database is suddenly very sluggish, taking 1.5 seconds or more to fulfill each query. The problem began spontaneously and I hope it ends spontaneously too.

I'm looking into the Themed Concerts problem; that's just weird.

Amy Austin | September 30, 2008
Ugh... I am having the full-on dial-up experience over here -- 1.5 seconds would be merciful!

Scott Hardie | September 30, 2008
Themed Concerts is working again. Overall the site is still a little sluggish, but it's mostly recovered from whatever that was. A surge of traffic on the server, maybe?

Amy Austin | October 1, 2008
I am *definitely* not enjoying this random lottery of the dial-up effect... and I just had an "offline beyond Scott's control" message, too -- though it did only last for a few seconds, apparently...

Amy Austin | October 17, 2008
Okay, I'm sorry to bitch again, but I can only take so much...
I have experienced more page load delays and time-outs and dropped connections than *EVER* before on this site, even cumulatively, in the last three weeks. It isn't a problem that seems to have a reason or to be going away at all. Am I the only one experiencing this???

Scott Hardie | October 17, 2008
I'm getting fed up with it, too. The anger at the last host, and the long time it took me to move to this one, are the only things keeping me from changing again. (That and having zero time for another move right now.) It's ridiculous; the timeout happens at least every fifteen minutes for me, seems like every 5-10.

Because the new host doesn't support scheduled scripts, and because the old host is paid up for another seven months, I established a bridge between them: A scheduled script on the old server uses an http connection to activate a script on this server that updates the site. But if the new host is offline at exactly midnight, the old host gets a timeout on that http connection and gives up. That means no new goo, no free cards in RB, and no anniversaries or birthdays on the homepage, until I notice the problem and fix it, whether that's at 12:01am or at 8am. I'm working on a code solution for it, but the real solution will be to change hosts. Miah, if you're reading this, let's talk.

Amy Austin | October 19, 2008

Me... waiting on goo.tc pages to load...

Scott Hardie | October 23, 2008
I'm done a little to help the problem now, but a real solution is going to take time from me, which means it will come after GooCon. The server DOES respond during "connection timeout" warning, and it DOES execute my php scripts... just not any script that requires a database connection, which is 100% of them. I can't tell if the database stops running for hardware reasons or if it chokes on requests because of the large amount of data stored in it (24k goo guesses, 64k cards used in concerts, 28k discussion comments, etc), but I'll do what else I can about the problem after the con. Plan B will be, sigh, moving to another webhost.

Scott Hardie | October 26, 2008
Until I can resolve the timeout errors, please assume that submitted data made it to the site. If you submit a form and it times out, and you hit refresh a few times, you'll wind up with multiple identical submissions.

Like I said above, it's one of two problems. If the problem is that my site is choking on too much data needing to load, my streamlining efforts this week may fix it. If that change is insufficient, or if the problem is that the database server simply goes down sometimes (which is out of my hands to fix), then Plan B is to move to another webhost. I have a potentially very good one standing by.

Scott Hardie | October 29, 2008
Bad news: I have determined that the problem is the database server. It simply hangs sometimes, not responding to a query, until the page times out. I could eliminate a few queries in my code to reduce the problem, but what would be the point? If a given page uses 10 queries instead of 12, it's still going to hang on that first query. Several minutes go by and then everything's fine again, until it happens again. I've put several other sites on this webhost, but none that use a database, so I didn't know about it until now.

That means it's time to change webhosts. Again. Yay.

I still have a new, promising webhost on the line, but it won't be cheap; it's nearly twice what I pay my ISP to get online at home. Whether I go with that host or a cheaper one, I won't be able to pay for it and make the transfer until mid-November, which leaves us with these aggravating timeouts in the interim. I'm as frustrated about them as you are, and growing concerned that I might be losing users because of them. There's nothing more I can do about them until then, but we are on track to put this mess behind us in time.

Amy Austin | October 29, 2008
I'll try to be patient. And if I had a job, I'd be all about paying a subscription fee, too.

Scott Hardie | November 6, 2008
Oh, how I love coming home from my job, where I deal with website emergencies all day, to a site that's been offline for seven hours because the new webhost's database files got corrupted. I'd write to tech support, but they never answered my emails about the connection timeouts, so why should this be different? I'm moving goo.tc this weekend and that's it.

Amy Austin | November 6, 2008
Woohoo!

Scott Hardie | November 7, 2008
Well, sort of. The last site migration took me three full days of work, and there's a goo tournament this weekend, during which I don't want anybody unable to reach the site because of slow DNS propagation. So what I'll probably do is set up my files on the new server this weekend, work out the kinks over the following week, and finally begin pointing traffic there the following weekend after the tournament. We'll see.

Amy Austin | November 7, 2008
Woohoo!

Scott Hardie | November 13, 2008
Progress transferring to the next host: 40%

Days the current host has ignored my request for help: 12

The last host gave me weak brush-off answers that didn't help, but at least they answered. This one seems to know that they have problems and can't keep customers, since they insist on the first three months being paid up-front, no refunds. I looked the other way with them because I had good experiences with other sites, but none that use databases like this one does.

Maybe I should go back to an old company I used for hosting. I briefly signed up for them when I was first building this version of the site two years ago, and now that my two-year account is expiring, I can't get them to STOP contacting me about renewing it. So far I've gotten eight emails and two calls asking me if I'm really, really sure I want to let it expire. I like their domain-registration service, but if they put as much work into improving their hosting service as they do into customer retention efforts, they'd never have lost my interest in the first place. (One mysql database with no upgrade option? Please.)

Kelly will be at a camping event upstate from Friday night through Sunday night, with the car, which means I'll be sealed in the apartment with nothing to distract me from finishing this migration to the next host, not that I needed it. Here's hoping it goes well.

Amy Austin | November 13, 2008
*fingers crossed tight*