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AwakenedRage

Webhost Calamaties explained

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Last Monday night the forums started having resource issues that would result in the website throwing a 508 error. As a result of the resource issue many functions were limited and as a result we moved to InMotionHosting.  This host ran its shared hosting environments much differently in terms of resource allocation. We quickly realized that the homepage, not being optimized for this environment resulted in long loading times. This was due to the abundance of nonstatic content that was not optimized and made accessing the site different depending on location. I did not fix the static content issue until this Monday. When i noticed these issues the webhost worked quickly with me and explained that the way IPB works for production environment is to use UPC caching methods. normally used in a VPS setting. None of the caching methods were used besides the mandatory caching. I enabled temporary cahcing that saves to the disk to solve this issue. However, now that caching is working a new threat to the webhost emerged, website crawlers. The website had very few measures to limit crawlers because the old host either blocked them automatically, or had put them to a mandatory delay serverwide. 

 

The first day of the site being deployed was plagued with issues caused by Crawlers, to which I had to create measures to prevent them from consuming too much resources. This, in combination with compressing most of the sites sent content made the website run smoothly. I also had to change the PHP versions used in IPB to create a boosted forum with better processing speeds. Yesterday, the forums along with many other services, were having issues. it was at this point that I applied CloudFlare to send content statically. This allowe dpage content to be grabbed by mirrored cache from a server closer to the user for better latency. After I installecd Cloudflare there was one error that I made personally, I accidently added an A DNS record for chaotic united that pointed towards the ark subdomain. So half of the time it would go to the wrong server. After I installed everything last night everything was running smoothly and quickly identified the dilemas that we previous faced that we were unable to identify. With 24 hours, more then 1000 unique vistors were on the site along with 3 malicious bots.

 

Our tools were only able to give us the top connections using resources along with other relevant info to the connection. It is no wonder why we were having issues without cloudflare and that is because of these bots and large amount of connections. The traffic was legitmate traffic in large volumes and the DDoS protection measures in place had a tough time filtering it. But now with Cloudflare in place, everything is set (EXEPT FOR SSL WHICH WILL TAKE ANOTHER 24 HOURS). 

 

This has been one wild ride and I want to make it clear that going to IMH, they had assisted in everyway they could. The issues we were xperiencing were configuration setting on our side that we had to take care of. IMH had fufilled the SLA (Service Level Agreement) They responded to all the incidents and assisted me in anyway possible, even by just telling me what the issue was and linking me to their helpful documentation. All the negative experiences was outside of their power. Host1Plus on the otherhand violated the SLA several times. Most of the errors the past two days were misconfigurations by me. Halo thinks and has said that he is fed up with IMH, but there is no reason to. I hope that everyone who may also hold the same opinion to listen to this. IMH is not to blame and certainly H1P is not a reliable alternative to this. 

 

Configuration changes will be less impactful for now on, most configuration chagnes are small and will not be noticable or impact uptime. 

 

Apologies for all the issues caused. \

 

Stupid A Records :3

 

~ Michael/AwakenedRage

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