[Announcement] Everything disabled as a test.

[Furry-Sneezes]

This test will be ongoing in an attempt to isolate a recent increase in 500-errors. If you still experience frequent Error-500 messages on the other portions of the website, post here. If the uninstallation of the chat room allows things to function semi-normally around here again (and I know there's still a thumbnail related issue with Avea), then I'll see about a clean installation of the AJAX chat in some way or another. No logs or something.

[Kyrl]

I got more 500 errors trying to read and reply to this post than normal it felt like.

[ShilohDog]

Have you ever heard of Kiwi IRC? I use IRC a lot

[Furry-Sneezes]

So even with the chat room disabled, there's still 500's huh? Hmm...

That's interesting, because the site itself is at least loading quicker.

[Kyrl]

I got 2 500 errors just trying to load the web page.  It has been getting much worse.

[Furry-Sneezes]

The 'getting worse' part is what's confusing for me. I'm not sure what could be influencing it since nothing is directly changing around here except for artifacts of the chat room, which I did uninstall for now. I know too little about these things and am too poor to pay someone to help. It's very frustrating. It could also be other sub-domains of mine, or even other people's stuff within the server I'm using and not mine at all. :| I just don't know.

[oneofthree]

I still got the errors even with the chat gone.

[Furry-Sneezes]

Yeah. I haven't been able to try disabling the media gallery yet, because uninstalling that extension results in errors that I don't know how to bypass. I'm hoping to hear back from yasl at some point but he's tough to contact. :<

[Furry-Sneezes]

As an update to before, I've now disabled everything as a test to route out the error 500's, and quite frankly I'm stumped. I thought it was an issue with my addons here, or SOMETHING along those lines, but it seems that isn't the case. o.o; I guess I'll have to risk contacting my provider again and have them do more investigations. I'll do a database backup in case they find something worth shutting us down over, and I'm available over on DeviantArt if something happens.

[Furry-Sneezes]

As an update, they supposedly did a malware scan, found 'infected' SMF files (I'm not running with any addons atm, as a note) and these files are the default straight-from-the-zip files. So their malware scan is garbage. Not really sure what I'm going to do. I have over a year's worth of hosting time with these guys still paid for.

Don't suppose someone else can scout around and look for a place with $100 or less a year hosting that is unlikely to bitch about some degree of adult content..? Heh. I wouldn't know where to look.

[oneofthree]

HostGator?

Don't try A Small Orange, ever since they got acquired by some company they're terrible.

[yasl]

A malware scan?  I can't even comprehend what they think the relevance of malware is in the context of shared hosting -- either there's some hacked script that is abusing their systems in a way that will hurt their other customers and/or their reputation, or it's the site-runner's problem, not theirs.  Unless they claim you're /distributing/ malware.  But then your account would almost certainly be suspended already.

Anyway, you already know what my opinion of shared hosting is, compared to e.g. VPS.

But if you're stuck with shared hosting (please don't be) then HostGator is probably not a bad bet.  I seem to recall them having a fairly good name, and their Acceptable Use Policy mentions "porn" only to explicitly prohibit child porn.  Which, like, duh.  The clear in-between-the-lines meaning is that (US) legal porn is permitted.

[Furry-Sneezes]

Currently in talks with someone in the fandom.

And yeah, shared hosting is kind of a requirement in the sense that my budget is extremely small for this stuff. I appreciate what is given by those donating, but donations would probably have to double in order to move to another step and I can't really justify asking that of people when I'm as hands-off these days as I am. x.x;

As for the first bit there, yasl, it's them trying to problem solve things, they 'ran a malware scan' on the server, it 'returned' a few random php files including a fair number from the cache folder, and some tool I use (also php) on another subdomain that's been the same set of files unmodified for many years. So I don't know what they're thinking they're finding, but removing and replacing as-per-relevant with every file mentioned resulted in no improvement at all.

The bottom line is that ever since we did the beta thing, or hell, was it even doing it back then or only a little ways after putting it live? And it's gotten much worse since then. Even running vanilla here, things break if you as much as open a few tabs to the site. Yeesh. XD

I'll keep HostGator in mind; would I get the Cloud Storage step or the regular web hosting step? And if Cloud Hosting, would I get 4gb or 6gb ram? I have to have unlimited domains no matter what I grab, so I can't get the lower options. >.<;

[yasl]

Linode offers both $5/mo and $10/mo plans (and prohibits only child porn, non-consent, and bestiality, which they'd have to be really churlish to lump furry with), though admittedly the 25GB or storage on the $5 one would be a constraint.  Digitalocean probably has something similar.  But the real barrier there is likely the learning curve.

Malware scans are approximately worthless, and from the sounds of it Lunarpages' one produces loads of false positives.  It's not problem-solving, it's waving a divining rod.

Re HostGator, it's not immediately clear what their "cloud" offering is, but SMF is an old-style single-machine app, which makes me slightly anxious.  Though as long as the system presents (1) a single, shared MySQL database, and (2) a shared data directory, I think SMF should work.  It, uh, would be good to see if you can test it before buying.  They appear to have a 45-day money-back guarantee, and IIRC part of why HostGator were well-regarded back in the day was because they were really good at fulfilling that guarantee (and it was longer than most).

4GB should be plenty.

[Furry-Sneezes]

Given that I also have monthly costs related to the domain, and a few other domains, even $10 a month is pushing my budget higher. I am fairly sure that the two years I bought most recently with Lunarpages was at a $7 a month pricepoint.

In any case, there's no huge hurry, as I'm still giving Lunar a chance to actually figure out what's fucking me over. Gonna keep talking to the contact I have, as he's a fairly decent dude, and if that falls short of being usable or affordable, I'll look deeper into Gator. Have to try to get my money back with Lunar as well, though, or the next year of hosting had better be at a price point of $0.00/mo. *paid through another 12-15 months at Lunar atm. >.>*

[Furry-Sneezes]

Still trying to debug this issue.

https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=337407.20

Found a topic from ~10 years ago that talks of an identical issue, with the user returning to say that the host itself had somehow misconfigured its php systems after its upgrade. Thing is, they DID do a php upgrade around the time, so I've asked them to look into that.

In the mean time, I bumped the php.ini and index.php settings to have a 256 php memory allocation. Whatever that ends up doing. I did a stress test regardless and ended up still getting it to break, but it may have at least alleviated it slightly. Maybe I just have some weird bit-rot going on on the side of the server. Who knows. :< Just an update to let you guys know I'm still trying to work on it.

[Furry-Sneezes]

Annoyingly enough, their customer support has been absolutely crawling when it comes to their 'latest' responses. The quality of their replies is going even further down with lines such as 'couldn't reproduce the issue'... Nevermind the fact that I barely visit and I get the Error 500s most times I come here.

I've stripped out some php with another site I run (thx to a friend) and even with that stress removed from the server, the frequency of the 500s hasn't dropped in the least. With this forum basically running vanilla, and the media gallery shut down (even temporarily), it's awkward how frequent these error 500s are, to the sense that this CANNOT be through the fault of my webpages. I have nothing on my server that should be resulting in such a heavy load, and we're talking even basic scripts are resulting in these memory shutdowns. X_x;

[Furry-Sneezes]

They finally did some real technical work on the server. Dirty slow bastards. I am a bit optimistic. I just loaded a topic with 3 attachments. It didn't break.

So.... I'm going to bring back in the various addons now and see if it continues to hold.