Recent Post In IMOC MR2 General Section:

[Mk2] [NA] Spare wheel options?
depending on your profile on the 15s and 17s repec..
From : Tiny

Recent Post In IMOC MR2 Modification Section:

[Mk2] [NA] Berk-a-like Exhaust
why does no-one come and ask the local exhaust spe..
From : jap-spec-performance

Home > News > Our Brand New Server

Our Brand New Server

Originally posted in 'The New Server'

I'm sure you will have noticed *cough* our downtime last night, and hopefully, you've seen a small increase in performance compared to this time last month. We were right on the limits of our old dedicated servers performance - it regularly was showing load averages of > 10, so we've taken the choice not to renew with our old hosting providers (since they really couldn't offer us any better hardware, just using multiple machines for database back-end and website front end), which didn't really interest us.

I thought I'd just write a little bit about it, so you can see a little bit into the stuff which goes on behind the scenes to keep IMOC available. I think the downtime last night was the longest outage we've had since I've been involved - which I think is pretty good for a community run site with no dedicated web-nerds.

So, now we have a brand new dedicated server to run the site. We've gone from a P4 to a Xenon 3060 CPU, and now with 2gb and SATA RAID setup, which gives us loads more headroom for sorting out the front pages of the site. (i.e. we can spend time doing that, rather than trying to squeeze a little more performance out of the hardware). Apart from moving hardware, we've also moved hosting provider from Fasthosts (who we've been using for the old dedicated server, and also for the shared hosting we were on before then), to Memset. If anybody is really interested, our domain is temporarily hosted with another hosting provider, but will be moving back to Memset in the near future, which will improve the initial lookup performance a little bit more.

I think we've managed to get away without losing pictures, or posts from the database, and the inital page reload problems are sorted, although there are a few more things which we need to fix up (Email notifications are probably not working quite right at the moment), but for the downtime, we might have even got away with the move without any major downtime (which would be quite an achievement). If you have lost any images, then you'll just have to upload them again, sorry about that.

We did have to move quickly on it, in order to save the £120 for a months hosting with our old hosting provider, so thanks go out to BenF and the rest of the committee for dealing with all of the other stuff which is going on at the moment so we can get on with keeping the major part of the club running without any problems (especially to the sherriff).

Thanks to all of the people who put comments on the temporary emergency message on Luckymonkey - it does help keep you going (don't worry if you didn't see it, i'll post the link below you missed out on)

Ok, thats about it - I hope this new server lasts us rather longer than the old one, cos I don't want to be doing all of that again in a hurry!

If you do find any problems, could you post them onto the bottom of this thread :
http://www.imoc.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=67346&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight

After careful consideration, Memset gave us the best balance of cost, hardware performance, support and geographic location and so we placed an order with them. The new sever actually cost just over £2100, but is reliant on us doing the basic server support, admin (eg backups) and setup.

Last word - without our Premium members and our Affiliates, an investment like this would not be possible - we thank you for your support of IMOC-UK.

Enjoy!

Speedy & BenF (and Esmond)

 

Oh - and the link you missed out on is here :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7P59YBoz_o

IMOC Latest News

IMOC Garage