An Explanation of Our Down Time Lately
It’s not often we get a chance to fill the public and our users in on what’s happening around here.
You may have noticed in the past week that we were down frequently and we ourselves were scratching our heads.
IndexWa.org was never intended to be a popular website. We figured on 1,000-5,000 hits a month and it would be a piece of cake to run.
Now we are NOT complaining, we are just filling you in. Something happened at about the 3 year mark of IndexWa.org and we began getting 35-75,000 hits a month and on two occasions we exceeded 140,000 hits.
We are on a shared server with we don’t know how many other websites (a guess would be 20) and we all draw from the same CPU (hopefully this is not too technical). Then, because we were pigs, we began having outages here and there. Five minutes a day, 10 minutes here, 15-20 there and it began to take a toll on our nerves as we want to be up 24/7, especially in the summer and winter months. Most Hosts guarantee a 99% up time which is reasonable.
So, to save money (our donors have paid for everything this past year and we THANK YOU), we moved our site from the single CPU to a GRID. The grid is a single CPU shared by others but if things get busy, it pulls ACROSS THE GRID to a bay of 20-30 other servers that are not as busy, thereby lowering our down time significantly and saving us a TON of money without having to opt for a VDed (Virtual Dedicated Server, a server just for us).
Between Wednesday and Saturday of last week we were down a LOT. We had 72 notices in my email box over those few days notifying us of down time anywhere from 5 minutes to 28 minutes. BAD. How can that be we inquired.
Since we do not review our Stats every day I figured it was time to take a peek. OH MY GOSH. From January 1, 2011 up to this writing, we have served up 984,890 Sever Requests and 326,847 Requests for pages. In just the past 7 days we have served up 56,505 Requests for pages and 93,201 Requests to the server. These are HUGE numbers for a small town site that we thought would never gain in popularity. The scary part is, TI’S STILL GROWING!! (Not complaining).
All of the above said, we may have to go to a VDed after all but it costs $$$ and we can’t do it without donations. This is an expense we never expected. If we continue to have downtime (in large amounts), that is the choice we will have to make. I just don’t know how long I will be able to support it out of my own pocked.
We are not going to go away or just pack up. That is not our style and I personally am committed to this project (which has turned into a job, but a fun job). We have met a lot of nice folks inside and outside of town and we have dedicated people whom donate to us in small amounts yearly and THEY are the ones that have made this site possible. We have had a couple of larger donors also and you know who you are and we promised to keep it silent (not your names but your donation amount).
Only time will tell if we need to go VDed. Hopefully that is not too soon. A friend of ours told us we can always sell blood. What a sense of humor.
We thank EVERYBODY who has made our site such a success. It actually chokes me up some time when I think about it.
We KNOW everything will work out. It always has thanks to you and my wife and I don’t mind eating beans and bread for a few days a year to keep it rolling.
Again, we THANK YOU for everything.
Ed & Dottie

