Web hosting upgrades

[David N. Snyder]

Sorry about the down times lately. If you have seen our messages at Dhamma Wheel on facebook, then you already know what is going on. In case anyone hasn't seen that:

We got too big!! This is a good thing; for Dhamma propagation, that is. We got so big that the shared server we were using was about to crash. The web hosting company shut us down, we were so big with too many hits per day. All of the TheDhamma.com websites are tallied together in terms of hits and Dhamma Wheel, Dharma Wheel (Mahayana), and Dhamma Wiki were receiving thousands of hits per day, overloading the shared server.

So we have upgraded to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) Gold package which means that all TheDhamma.com sites will be on their own dedicated virtual server; not shared with other sites. We should be able to handle somewhere near one million hits per day without a problem from now on. Previously I thought that there needed to be around one million posts or so here at Dhamma Wheel before we needed an upgrade, but guess I was wrong and underestimated the amount of traffic we were receiving.

Dharma Wheel has been receiving an especially high number of hits recently and we are still in the process of transferring that database to the new server. Hopefully, Dharma Wheel (Mahayana) will be back online by this time tomorrow.

[appicchato]

Kudos Dr. Snyder...

[David N. Snyder]

Thanks Bhante!

Special thanks to our ordained Sangha members here, Ben, Retro, the other moderating staff, AND all the lay people and other participants here. Any fool with a little money can start a website or forum, but it takes a great community to make it something this special. A website with no one visiting or participating is useless.

[Kim O'Hara]

And here was me worrying about another Denial of Service attack ... 'too big' is a much better problem to have.


Kim

[Ben]

Thank you David.
Much merit to you, my friend!
with metta,

Ben

[David N. Snyder]

Thanks Ben; merit shared with everyone here.

Attention: all Dharma Wheel (Mahayana) members:

Dharma Wheel has just gone back online on the new server! You may still be receiving a sign that says "technical difficulties, we will be back tomorrow." Just hit the refresh button and DWM will appear. The technical difficulties sign may still be in your cache.

[Modus.Ponens]

Thank you David for your dhamma dana. I rejoice in your imeasurable merit!

[puppha]

Many thanks for your noble efforts, David!

[David N. Snyder]

If you are reading this, you probably are not having any problems reaching this site or logging-in, but if you know someone who is still having problems, please let them know that it is most likely their computer storing the old DNS IP. Have them follow these instructions:

Go to start menu
Go to run
type in: ipconfig /flushdns
enter

That will flush out the old DNS IPs that the computer stores in the cache for quicker browsing. Our website IPs all changed with the upgrade to the new server.

(there is a space between ipconfig and /flushdns)

Or have them try this link for other operating systems:
http://www.techiecorner.com/35/how-to-f ... ndows-mac/

[Ben]

Thanks David!

[m0rl0ck]

Many thanks for the hard work of the dhammawheel.com team

[David2]

Many thanks for the hard work of the dhammawheel.com team

+1
dhammawheel is my favorite website on the internet.

[Birgit]

Thank you for your hard, time-consuming work for Dhamma Wheel!

[David N. Snyder]

Some more info; hope it is helpful for those who are still experiencing problems:

How to clear DNS cache for Windows and OS X:
http://docs.cpanel.net/twiki/bin/view/A ... owserCache

I heard from my webmaster that if you are able to access the site via a proxy, then the problem has to be with your computer, lack of dns flush or something, not the Dharma Wheel / Dhamma Wheel site here.

Here is another site he just showed me:
http://www.isup.me/

Be sure to check this isup.me site; it's pretty cool which you can use to check so many other sites too.

[retrofuturist]

Greetings,

I heard from my webmaster that if you are able to access the site via a proxy, then the problem has to be with your computer, lack of dns flush or something, not the Dharma Wheel / Dhamma Wheel site here.

Typical webmaster response...

Nonetheless, it's good to see all the kinks are gradually working themselves out.



Metta,
Retro.