Sorry for the downtime
Apologies to everyone for the server outage that has forced F1 Fanatic offline for the past four days.
The problem seems to have been caused by the large amounts of traffic visiting the site, which have continued to rise even during the off-season. I am of course very happy that so many people are coming to F1 Fanatic, but I’m not an expert on running web servers and I failed to anticipate the strain this would put on my system.
F1 Fanatic is now running on a new and faster server, and hopefully that will solve the problem. If you are experiencing difficult visiting the site please contact me either via the contact form, on Twitter or via the F1 Fanatic Facebook Group.
Thanks very much for all the offers of help, assistance and hosting alternatives that came in from many of you. I would like to keep in touch with everyone who offered advice and ideas so I can learn from them and avoid a repeat of this gigantic inconvenience.
Once again, I’m very sorry for the downtime and I’ll do my best to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Now, back to F1…
mmm still getting the odd internal 500 error…
I know, I’ve just discovered that as well.
To be honest, I’m absolutely gutted. I have no idea why it is still doing this. I’ll be in touch with everyone who’s offered help to get some help, but I was very confident that the upgrade was going to fix the problem.
Sorry everyone.
Great to have you back Keith. Really missed all the news and comments . I thought we was never gonna get you back. But these things do happen.
i’m not geting the 500 internal error yet!!!!! fingers crossed
An earlier description of the problem is here for anyone who might be able to offer some assistance.
A hole in my life has just filled up, great to have you back Keith!
I wondered what’d happened – I was blaming my mobile internet
Good to have you back.
Good to have you back. This is an excellent site and I appreciate all the work you put into it. Thanks.
The lingering error messages could possibly be down to the various DNS servers and cache servers not having fully refreshed yet, I’d give it a day or so before spending to much effort trying to track them down…
Anyway, good to have you back online…
Are you getting 500s as well Adrian?
Just shows how popular a blog you have Keith, keep up the good work!
well, I am not sure what your problem may be, but I started to experience database troubles from the moment I upgraded to Wordpress 2.7. Nothing seemed to be wrong but the errors kept coming up, especially while I was working in the admin area. It all seems to have fixed itself after upgrade to Wordpress 2.7.1
Good to see the site up and running, again. Keep up the good work, Keith!
ps ax show that you are running php as fast-cgi or cgi and there is nothing interesting
second log shows no much … just missing content type … may be you have some wring redirect to file which apache don’t know what to do, but this itself can’t be reason for crash …
could you make changes to your php.ini and specify
error_log = some_file
then check file for reason why php died if 500 is from php …
next log is just a notice
It’s amazing how productive I’ve been without this site up…better not happen again!
If you have a dedicated server, switch to lighttpd, and reduce the number of db queries the blog software makes. Should reduce the load by a lot.
Welcome back Keith
Nice to see you back up and running.
Considering Keith provides such a quality blog for free, can I remind us to click on one of the adverts to help out. I try to do this now and then.
Not sure how much revenue Keith gets from it though.
I am glad too see? – that youre back again Keith – even though I havent been adding to many comments it’s developed into a daily catchup with whats happening in this at times maddening F1 world – thanks for youre hard work
“the server outage that has forced F1 Fanatic offline for the past four days.”
Only four days?!?
God, it seemed like it was two weeks or sth.
Tell me about it. I’ve not been fun to live with recently…
Keith,
I ran this past my guru (briefly), and his response was “Looks like a server config issue. The mime setup is probably wrong on the server if mod_mime is barfing”… hope that helps (doesn’t mean anything to me!)
At last- alive and kickin’ is exactly how we want your blog to be Keith.
Glad to see you up and running again Keith. Keep up the good work and more power.
Glad its back, great site!
Just glad you are back. I’ve been having withdrawal symptoms lol and they are not pretty, believe me…
While sorry to hear about the downtime, its great that your getting more and more traffic, keep up the good work.
Keith,
I think your recent site SUSPENSION maybe had you KERSing, at why your SLICK site CRASHED your FORMULA to be on TRACK for 2009 RACES.
So as you WING your way TYRElessly to find what is BRAKING the BUTTONs, I’ll spend some time at SIDEPODcast, as a DIFFUSER, and hope you don’t EXHAUST yourself picking over the (WISH)BONES of the site.
May the MAXimum DOWNFORCE be with you.
argh…
wb, felt like forever.
Welcome back! Don’t worry Keuth, we know you always do your best for this site, and so many people appreciate it.
Greetings from Italy
Thanks guys!
Can I ask, are people still getting errors at the moment? If so, please leave details.
I do keep getting the temporary holding page when I first try and come to the site, but a Ctrl+F5 refresh clears it.
Good to have you back Keith, and for what it’s worth I haven’t had a single error since your return.
Great to have the site back online!
Phew THANKGOODNESS your back!!
I was beginning to get depressed without you people to talk about F1 with!!
i went to the Jerez tests on thursday! i can tell you im no hamilton fan but he was the only one that looked like he knew what he was doing (not to add vettel and webber they were also quiet good) Renaults car looks very slow to me with alonso on board at least! anyways i have some photos if you want them Keith though they arent very good!
Great to have F1F back online, no more 500 errors for me so far…
Would it not be possible to have the same site running on a mirror to avoid any future issues from causing the whole site to be down – a fallback if you like!?
I’ll be looking into this among other solutions, although it isn’t cheap
I have two web co-located servers in the Netherlands. If you’d like you could put your site on that as backup. If the architecture is something you could use of course (FreeBSD)
Here still errors:
Due to server problems, F1 Fanatic is temporarily unavailable
We’re working on fixing the site at the moment.
Please note the following services are still available:
F1 Fanatic Forum (read more about the downtime here)
Maximum Motorsport
And you can stay in touch using:
Twitter
Facebook
Drop.io
Sorry for the inconvenience, we will have the site back again as soon as possible
Good luck, we miss you!!!!
Upsss… working on firefox but not on IE 6….
Strange .-)
Welcome back Keith
Those of you who are still seeing the ‘F1 Fanatic is closed’ page can remedy that by hitting Ctrl-F5. That page has been deleted, your browsers just have the old version cached still.
I’m aware of thee IE6 glitch, that’s an unrelated CSS problem which I’m going to take a look at shortly.
Is anyone still getting Error 500s?
using ie, no errors. welcome back.
Working perfectly now on IE 6
Cheers.
welcome home again!!!!
Thanks Keith.
My favourite spanish blog was having the same problem since yesterday, what a mess…
Now eerybody ok again, buff….
Just want to add my WB Keith.
Your site was sorely missed.
Firefox user – no problems
Great to see everything up and running again- I did indeed miss everything for the time that you were down.
I was still getting the error messages on my home PC, but the control + F5 cleared it easily. Good luck with the catching up
using IE8 and no errors at all keith
Keith, Firefox user here also- no problems today. Whew..I thought it was computer, it is two years old and we know how outdated PC’s become and fast! Haven’t had any problems today. A few pictures took considerable time to load but that could be my bandwidth…
F1 on……….
I was having the same problem as EGC. The Ctrl+F5 fixed it. Man, I was getting pretty antsy with no F1F! All the other sires dont have the personal feeling that F1F is all about.
Great work Keith!
Did you hear that USF1 is considering signing Danica Patrick? I did some research on some active female racers, some of them are going pretty well. Fancy doing a post about it?
Thanks Jay – yes I did see that, am thinking of doing an article on it, but I’ve still got a lot of work to do on site administration at the moment to ensure it runs properly.
Welcome back.
When iconnect to http://www.f1fanatic.co.uk I get to a maintanance page? Has the address changed?
GREAT TO HAVE YOU BACK UP AND RUNNING!
Looks good. No errors on my part. Will let you know if I come across anything.
@Carl, just clear out your cache. Most probably you are using or trying to access the cached version.
welcome back
I assume that you are on a shared hosting on 1and1 ? if you remember during the Live chat I told you that 1and1 has many bad reviews
. very slow and they host like 2000 accounts on a single server.
Anyway My advice is go for a managed VPS ( $35/month) – you won’t have any problems in the future
.
@carl : Try to clear your cache .