Sorry for the downtime
16th February 2009, 7:44 by Keith Collantine 57 Comments »
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…
todd said on 16th February 2009, 7:49
mmm still getting the odd internal 500 error…
Keith Collantine said on 16th February 2009, 7:57
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.
scunnyman said on 16th February 2009, 18:33
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.
scunnyman said on 16th February 2009, 18:34
i’m not geting the 500 internal error yet!!!!! fingers crossed
Keith Collantine said on 16th February 2009, 8:04
An earlier description of the problem is here for anyone who might be able to offer some assistance.
Somers said on 16th February 2009, 8:33
A hole in my life has just filled up, great to have you back Keith!
Noel said on 16th February 2009, 8:43
I wondered what’d happened – I was blaming my mobile internet
Good to have you back.
Mark S said on 16th February 2009, 8:50
Good to have you back. This is an excellent site and I appreciate all the work you put into it. Thanks.
Adrian said on 16th February 2009, 8:51
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…
Keith Collantine said on 16th February 2009, 14:17
Are you getting 500s as well Adrian?
DG said on 16th February 2009, 8:52
Just shows how popular a blog you have Keith, keep up the good work!
milos said on 16th February 2009, 8:59
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
Lustigson said on 16th February 2009, 9:27
Good to see the site up and running, again. Keep up the good work, Keith!
mail123456 said on 16th February 2009, 9:34
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
Loki said on 16th February 2009, 9:50
It’s amazing how productive I’ve been without this site up…better not happen again!
cyanide said on 16th February 2009, 9:54
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.
D Winn said on 16th February 2009, 10:03
Welcome back Keith
Chalky said on 16th February 2009, 10:08
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.