I'm still trying to work out the problems with our hosting company. The website was down most of the day yesterday with the MySQL server going down or failing to respond. Page load times were terrible, if they even loaded at all. Transfer speed from the server for images and larger files was peaking out at 10k/sec.

Because of the holiday, nobody was in the office to handle my problem ticket. I do have a complete backup of the blog and forum from May 24th which, worse comes to worse, would be a restore point if the problems with the current MySQL server is not resolved. This might also be a good time to explore making the forum the landing page for website. Making a major change like that would wreak havoc on search engine ranking, but I do feel placing the forum in a sub-folder of the blog was a mistake; especially since the majority of user activity is in the forum.

The most surprising thing to come out of all of this is my new understanding of how complex and in-depth the issues are with running a website; from SEO, to memory limits in php.ini, to web page optimization, editing style sheets and writing PHP code. It's a full time job just to keep up with it.

Truthfully, this website is a one man operation - me.      I'm a Network Engineer by trade, with 25 years of computer experience under my belt. I'm also an audio fanatic who happens to love vinyl records.    It's really hard to venture out and try to accomplish something on your own and so much easier if you're part of a team. Unfortunately, for now, it's just me, so I do apologize for the interruptions, delays and website outages - especially to the long time users of the site and guests who may be hesitant to join because of the website performance issues.   

I have no idea what the problem was yesterday, or why it seems to be hobbling along good enough for me to write this message. It's pretty bad when your in the MyPHPAdmin panel and it fails to respond, throwing a 404 error message in the middle of exporting the database. I have 3 trouble tickets open, hopefully someone at the hosting company will be able to find the problems and correct them.

I'll know more when the techs get back to me later today. I'd really like to know what would cause ftp up/download speeds to drop to 10k/sec, along with the MySQL server failing to respond to queries.

-Brian D

Man, managing a forum must be really a hard work!
10 months, seems to me I joined yesterday!