The Racketboy Server Issue

[marurun]

A friend of mine really love the Vanilla forum software. But as it is named, it is indeed quite vanilla.

[racketboy]

I'll try to keep from rambling and cut to the point.
Sorry for all the server issues the last few weeks.
I "upgraded" to a Virtual Private server a couple weeks ago thinking it would be the next logical step of making a faster and more stable site.
It was faster -- when it was up. The first server I tried has 256MB of RAM. I quickly learned that this site was far too busy for only that amount (even though the server cost almost twice as much as my old shared one)

So I upgraded to one with twice the RAM. I still maxed it out at times and it crashed at least once a day. These VPSs also required me to manage the whole thing myself.
Between the high price, the lack of stability, and the overhead, I quickly decided that I was better off with the shared server (that offers me 4GB or RAM at its peak)

So...while this shared server might not be perfect, it is relatively stable.
I'm going to have some tweaks done to it to make sure that I use it to the best of its ability.
I will also be focusing on hosting many of the site's images on an external host to keep the load down on this server.

So again I'm sorry for all the downtime (I felt the pain more than anyone) and lets hope for the best from here on out.
If you see anything funny in the coming days, please email me - racketboy a t gmail

WordPress is pretty terrible at handling large amounts of traffic. Poorly optimized code - it's pretty amazing how bad lol. Another CMS platform might be advisable, such as MovableType or Joomla (though Joomla didn't give me enough control for my needs, personally).

Another message board system might help as well, but I'm actually not certain how phpBB fares compared to other systems, like SimleMachines or IPB.

Actually Wordpress isn't as bad as you might think. Caching helps a lot. I can handle a large Digg attack (100s of thousands of visitors) easily on this shared server as long as I host the images elsewhere. I just migrated from Blogger not too long ago and invested a lot of money into the porting it over. I've been quite happy with the capabilities. I'm happy with the forum as well. The only other forum software that would make me happy is vbulletin, which isn't free. I'm hoping to upgrade to phpbb3 in the next week or so. I've been running v3 elsewhere and it seems pretty good. They did a lot of updating.

The stupid thing about the VPS server is that CPanel actually took up most of the RAM. I'm looking at the empty server right now and it's using over 200MB or RAM. That's just stupid.