Out of the 10 years my site has been active, it has run some version of IP.Board for about 8 of them. Over the years, it has become a bit of a running joke among the people who have been around since the begining at how often the site goes down. We don't delete old inactive threads because they are often informational references for us. That means our database is large relative to the size of our user community.

We've moved from server to server to try and cure our nearly constant database woes until finally landing on VPS.net where I could just throw more nodes at the server to make the problems go away. That ended last night. After yet another database crash, I knew something more serious had to be wrong. There is simply no way that an IP.Board that gets at most 9,000 page views a day, spread out fairly evenly through the day needs more than 8 nodes of VPS.net.

I am an I.T. guy... but I'm not a Linux server specialist. My specialties are elsewhere. My bad habit of breaking C&G while trying to fix something on the server left me rather gun shy about configuring this our latest server any more than what it comes with out of the box.

Gary worked for over 9 hours today, with almost no notice, first repairing our database (a frustrating task because the server would crash mid-repair), then tuning up the server to properly utilize its power and installing additional software that will enhance our speed. In short, both our speed and reliability will be like nothing C&G has ever had before.

After consulting with Gary, I estimate I will be able to cut the number of node, and thus my server costs, in half and still have the reliability I need.

Need someone to help solve your server issues? I highly recommend Gary. My thanks and the thanks of my users go out to him.

damn nice of him, lot of good people on this forum helping me too. extremely new to unmanaged linux vps personally.

Yup, Gary helped me out a week or so ago. My dedicated server is now purring along.

3DKiwi

Who is Gary and how can I get in touch with him?

:)

LOL I may need to beg in a bit too, want to see how well I do at it first LOL
only on unmanaged vps a few days now. so far not to bad (thanks to people here) but I am a win server (2003, 2003r2, 2008r2 and SBS2011) guy so its a curve.