EEVblog Electronics Community Forum

I have now moved the forum back to my old web host Hostmonster.com!
The blog is still hosted on the troublesome Sitecloud server, so it was easiest for me to register the new domain eevforum.com to do this.
Not sure if I will keep eevforum.com or go back to eevblgo.com/forum, but for now it will remain on the new name.
Some people tell me separate forum domain name is not good for SEO? Probably right, but I kinda like it so far.

Anyway, I think everything is back up and running, and I've got a handle now on deleting and rebuilding MySQL databases and manually moving the forum, so I'm now much more confident in moving and tweaking with the forum in the future.

Let me know ASAP if you spot any problems.

Speed seems almost instant compared to Sitecloud!

Thanks.
Dave.

my avatar is missing

My gosh, so fast now, one issue i noticed, since i save my passwords, it won't put it in the new site and i forgot what my password was here, so i entered my user name, it said it would send a link to reset, that was about 3 hours ago, no link so far(yes i check spam/junk) so not sure if thats not set up right. But i did find it(options, show passwords) lol

The redirect to eevforum.com seems to be borked in some cases.

If you have a link that includes index.php it redirects to www.eevforum.comindex.php - note the missing slash.
Should be easy to fix by adding the slash in the right place. =)



SEO....

Any change will hit your Stats.
I think the long term solution would be to move the forum to a subdomain i.e. forum.eevblog. This way you can point it to another server but it stays within the scope of a single domain. Maybe someone else is a bit more current on SEO theories. =)

Problem is having the domain at a provider that allows to do so, and also to use a provider that allows such "external" domains.

SO VERY much better.
I was beginning to give up, it was so slow.

what i fear is that if this is the like the beginning when the forum was transferred to sitecloud, all were doing well, until yesterday. maybe i'm just thinking too far forward. i just dont want the history to re-occur, or maybe its just the way it is.

Quote from: shafri on January 12, 2011, 08:39:44 pm

what i fear is that if this is the like the beginning when the forum was transferred to sitecloud, all were doing well, until yesterday. maybe i'm just thinking too far forward. i just dont want the history to re-occur, or maybe its just the way it is.

Fear not Shafri, the forum is back on the exact same ultra reliable server at Hostmonster like before the move to SiteCloud screwed up everything.
The only issue might be if I move the Blog back over as well, will the shared server handle the load?

Dave.

Not sure if it will or not, what does Hostmonster guarentee you? in terms of ram and stuff like that? other thought would be get a shared "dedicated" server(you share the box, but you are guaranteed so much CPU use and ram)

The blog has now also moved back to the Hostmonster server OK.
I'm now thinking I'll move the forum back to it's original location of eevblog.com/forum just to maintain the SEO.
I'll have the new eevforum name link to it though, and probably masked so you can use either.
So if the forum goes into maintenance mode again soon, that's what I'm doing.

Thanks.
Dave.

My work blocks websites they feel present a security risk and for some reason this change no longer allows me to browse at work :/

Dave,

I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say Thanks for all the hard work you've put into fixing sitecloud's stuffup.

A Google search with 'sitecloud' and 'sucks' is starting to show more and more hits over the last few days.  .

Yes, thank you!

and on a side note since you moved the forum back to www.eevblog.com I can now access it at work again!  Productivity shall resume as "normal".

For those following the SiteCloud.com saga, they have finally admitted they screwed up big time:

Dear SiteCloud customer,

This is Trey Gardner CEO of SiteCloud and I am writing to update you on our efforts here to better provide you with great service and support.

Let me first say that I have been disappointed by some of our service standards of late, specifically within the last 3-4 weeks. Our speed and uptime have been a problem recently and we are very much aware of this fact and we have been aggressively working on solutions to the issues.

Back in December we had an issue that was related to our cloud hosting provider's network and how they were structuring our cloud environment. We fixed that issue and things were working far better. As we were monitoring the environment we saw an issue which we knew would cause future problems and we began working on the solution. This issue caught up to us this week as we were implementing our solution and some of our clients experienced speed issues and error messages. We are continuing to work on completely resolving the current issues as well as look to head off any future problems.

Our cloud hosting solution is unlike any other providers, anywhere in the world. We believe we are at the doorstep in a new era in web site hosting and we admit that there are some unforeseen areas where issues can pop up however we are confident we can meet those problems head on and solve them more proactively than we have in the recent weeks.

This is not the level of service which you should expect from us, we demand far higher standards of ourselves and you should as well. SiteCloud is a young company but web hosting is an area where I have personally had success and although SiteCloud is different from shared, VPS or Dedicated server hosting because of the Cloud Infrastructure, I believe that SiteCloud will become one of the best web hosting companies on the internet and I am dedciated to making that happen.

As we continue to mobilize to fix the problems we have faced you may always check our http://twitter.com/sitecloud account for updates.

I greatly appreciate everyone's patience as we work to make our services even better. Thank you for your support,

Trey Gardner
CEO SiteCloud.com

Did you also do an update?
I can see who is in a topic before clicking on it!
Cool!
apex

sometime i got lines of members currently in topic. never caught my eyes before, just couples of members listed. so i guess this is new.

To be honest I think people over push this SEO business, because that is what it is all about: business, many users have commented finding the forum on google when searching for the rigol or other stuff. I've setup websites before and they have got hits fairly quickly, the secret I think is just do it, do it right and you will reap. I setup www.rotaract1070.org.uk  for my rotaract district and it very soon got a lot of hits, when I looked in the stats at the searches viewers had performed to find it I noticed that it was not far down the list from the well established UK national site  that had been going for years www.rotaract.org.uk, and I did nothing special except for make sure I have plenty of relevant content.

I think this SEO lark is for the wanker "webmasters" that want to get results onto crap in hours without having anything decent to share. of course if you have a major website and then move it you will loose a back log of search results that will remain whilst being broken links until your website is recrawled and climbs the popularity list again. then again when your some ecomerce website selling the same crap as the next man I guess fractional advantages make a difference

well of course it depends on the size of your website and what you are doing. there probably are things you can do to help but really unless your trying to squeeze every ounce playing by the book tends to work quite well, word of mouth is a great way of spreading. Beleive it or not having a rushdenrotaract.org.uk (which now simply redirects to a section of the rotaract1070.org.uk) meant that someone goggling "dogging in rusdhen" (don't ask I have NO idea my website has nothing to do with that sort of thing) got us a hit, the only operative word being infact "rushden"

OH NO,

is it just me, or the forum has once again developed the speed wobbles?

As I type, it is taking an eternity to load pages.

It is 22:15 UTC 16/1/11 ATM.

Not just you, i emailed Dave and he said its slow for him too, and also that he is seeing some sort of "CPU throtalling"

That seems an awful lot of database requests when you consider the number of users and forum items on the site to be honest. I have now idea how to do diagnostics on the SMF software, but I think more investigations need to be done.

That seems "a bit" excessive.
What produces this amount of traffic, the video files?

It shouldn't be, the video is server from Youtube.

Have wordpress or smf a tool to show you how many search engine bots are on the site?
Could be a move related re-indexing of their content.

Judging by my own website, search bots don't put a big load on the server, certainly not enough to explain that amount of bandwidth.

Had some serious problems with the googlebot a while back, after a change they re-indexed the whole site. That pretty much toasted a dedicated server. It should be easy to check if such a thing is the case.

Ah, Dave posted while I was typing so lets just say rephrase this and just say:
If the video files are not the reason for the gigabytes of traffic there is another serious problem with the site.

The bandwidth isn't really the biggest concern. It would be easy to move the downloadable video files over to Amazon S3 or another CDN.

High CPU and database usage is almost certainly due to poor programming in the blog and forum software, and these could mostly be fixed by enabling content caching. The blog itself should essentially require zero database accesses once cached because there aren't thousands of comments (you can just update the cached copy when a new comment is posted) and there's no user login facility. I can't think of any reason not to enable very aggressive caching in Wordpress in the EEVblog's case.

I've never administered an SMF installation, but it looks like it has some basic caching facilities, but these require the use of a PHP accelerator which the host may or may not support (most of these are commercial software, so it's unlikely that you'll get it on a shared server). The options are to rewrite bits of the forum to be less horrible (not trivial, but it might be a fun exercise) or move to a high-end virtual private server (not a $10/month one) or a dedicated server, or switch to a better piece of software.

In Australia, two of the largest forum sites are Whirlpool, which uses completely custom software, and OCAU, which uses vBulletin, which is commercial software but not especially expensive. Most of the huge international forums seem to be using custom software.

That also does not include my other websites.
Dave.

whats the other websites?

I was checking Alexa.com for a friend's web site stats, and decided to have a look at EEVBlog's. Now, I know they are a bit of a blunt instrument, but check this http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/eevblog.com specifically Pageviews/user.

In 2010 it was hovering around 4 or 5, then all of a sudden this month it has shot up to 15. I don't believe that more people are looking at 3 times the number of pages that they were before. I'm wondering if an indexing spider has gone feral or something and is hitting the database every few minutes and indexing the entire thing, skewing the stats. It does look a bit DDOSy.

In 2010 it was hovering around 4 or 5, then all of a sudden this month it has shot up to 15. I don't believe that more people are looking at 3 times the number of pages that they were before. I'm wondering if an indexing spider has gone feral or something and is hitting the database every few minutes and indexing the entire thing, skewing the stats. It does look a bit DDOSy.

The thing to remember about Alexa is that they track sites via their toolbar. That may not work to well with this audience since we know that most toolbars s*ck. Or at least I hope so. =)

Other than that, the answer is hidden in both the host based and integrated statistic tools.