Cartographers' Guild Moving Again???

[Robbie]

Hi all! I actually did it...I found a hosting company that offers dedicated hosting at a lower rate than what we're having here, and they seem to offer what may promise to be a little more stability and performance. It's a more established hosting company I think, not that our current one isn't established...but I believe we may be able to save a buck or two and increase performance and stability a little.

In preparation, once things begin, I will probably be turning off the ability to upload any attachments so that the files can be transferred to the new server and synchronized. Your ability to post will still be live until we actually make the switch...I'm hoping for as minimal of a service interruption as possible. I also don't have an exact timeline for this move, but it could be as early as next week.

What can you do to help you ask? I'm glad you asked! Ad revenue hasn't been that great...I'm not sure if it's due to decreased activity or just lack of interesting ads. You can click on the ads to support our sponsors though, that always helps...some of them are paying for ad space, and if you click their ads and visit their sites, it looks great for us! Some of the ads are automatic though, and we'd get additional revenue from those clicks You can also continue to donate to support the site directly. Those donations go a long way. The move may end up leaving us in a one month double bill cycle, where we owe hosting costs for two servers in one month. Having some additional padding to cover those costs will definitely help.

Anyways, be on the lookout for more information. I'll be posting here once I get all the details ironed out. Thanks again for your patience and support!

[Diamond]

Great to hear, Robbie! Anything to help improve the overall performance of the Guild is a good thing.

[Corilliant]

That's good news! I can see a future where the website will never crash again
(Oh noes the website will be down I shall die woe o woe...)

[Robbie]

Well, I have some good news and some normal news. I have been a little leary about this move and the potential new host. They're a little more salesy and pressury. But their cost was better. The big difference was that the cost savings would have been a self managed solution with me having to spend a lot more time maintaining the server and its security. So I brought it up with our current host and they actually decided to negotiate with me to keep our business. This means we don't have to move. But this also means we won't be getting any new stuff. But what I am going to do is spend some quality time trying to figure out why the server occasionally goes into "I don't want to work today" mode. And try and solve the problem rather than just blame the host. I must say I'm very pleased with the way Dreamhost has been willing to work with us. I still recommend them even though we've had some ups and downs.

Sent from my SCH-I545 using Tapatalk

[Jaxilon]

Thanks for keeping us informed. We would never have known otherwise. If the site is ever down I just email RobA and send him a text. I get a kick out of harassing him for some reason

[johnvanvliet]

I am going to do is spend some quality time trying to figure out why the server occasionally goes into "I don't want to work today" mode.

i have primarily redhat 5 and 6 experience with Apache 2 and mysql ,php.perl, phpmyadmin ( standard lamp stack)

depending on things i might be able to help

[mikoking]

I have used hosting sites from Webs.com, shivtr.com, guildportal.com......so many......and I have found that there are issues with all of them. The only way I know of to eliminate surprise downtime on a site is to run your own server, but that comes with a pretty much full-time job in maintaining it. I must say though, that while I have experience in websites, I have never run one with this many users before, so I don't know what additional problems present themselves with the heightened amount of traffic. I noticed that some people on here use skype for verbal communication, and I was just curious as to whether there was a ventrilo, teamspeak, mumble server for groups, or it there was a plan for one in the future sometime? I don't really know the demand of it for a community such as this seeing as how my experience with voice servers has been strictly for gaming purposes. (Hard to kill the boss and type in chat at the same time when you have lazy fingers, lol)