Thoughts Regarding Today’s Downtime…

Posted in Internet

Whelp, what a day! The blog landed on the homepage of both Digg.com and Fark.com, two of the leading Internet community news/content sharing websites. Thanks guys!

A few people have mentioned I need a server upgrade. Well, yes and no. I own a few dedicated servers for all the websites I run; I am not running off some shared hosting crap that some have suggested. This blog currently runs on a Intel Xeon 3060 Dual Core Conroe Processor with 4 GB of registered RAM. Today’s downtime was not bottlenecked by a connection overload, but actually, a CPU overload. Memory usage maxed out at 93.6%, with the highest recorded server load at 121.06 (cPanel experts, you should know what I’m talking about).

Reason? Well, since I haven’t used WordPress in a while, I kinda over-estimated its efficiency at processing large requests of data. It really stinks. Probably one of the worst pre-made CMSs that I’ve had to deal with. Furthermore, this blog actually runs on the dedicated server of one of my other, rather large, forum websites, which also has a poorly coded CMS (vBulletin). I wasn’t really anticipating the immense scale of attention that the stories received, so I didn’t get a chance to properly prepare the server for heavy load (minimize useless services, enable caching, etc).

So yeah, there you have it. In an effort to protect the uptime of my other site, which is a money maker (this blog makes peanuts; I can’t sacrifice real sites for the blog unfortunately), I was basically forced to temporarily suspend this blog (hence the 404, 403, 550 errors people were complaining about) so as to ensure the main site’s uptime.

I pay unlimited bandwidth for my rack of servers, and as much as I appreciate hordes of people informing me the blog is down, I don’t appreciate derogatory comments regarding my server and administration of the server thereof. I have complex load-balanced, multi-server setups for some really big sites.  My point? I’m no amateur, I’ve been running high-traffic websites for years and have dealt with the ‘Digg Effect’ many times successfully.

People tend to be overly-stereotypical that teenagers don’t know jack about servers and all the advanced techniques needed to properly maintain a website. But I consider my age is a bonus, not something to be shy about; Internet is my turf and ain’t no one gonna call me an amateur without proof to back it up!