ABOUT FREAKIN' TIME

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That said, it would be nice if someone active ends up with the necessary rights to post things like front page maintenance coming or scheduled messages. Most sites I manage, we swap out the home page with an informative single page with a comment about what is happening and when service should resume. We keep a baby server just for this purpose and prior to taking a sites server down we repoint the IP address to the baby server. After its up we swap it back, easy peasy!
 
Robert Porter said:
That said, it would be nice if someone active ends up with the necessary rights to post things like front page maintenance coming or scheduled messages. Most sites I manage, we swap out the home page with an informative single page with a comment about what is happening and when service should resume. We keep a baby server just for this purpose and prior to taking a sites server down we repoint the IP address to the baby server. After its up we swap it back, easy peasy!
Click to expand...

That is being taken care of. We are going to get this back to the way it used to be.
 
Robert Porter said:
That said, it would be nice if someone active ends up with the necessary rights to post things like front page maintenance coming or scheduled messages. Most sites I manage, we swap out the home page with an informative single page with a comment about what is happening and when service should resume. We keep a baby server just for this purpose and prior to taking a sites server down we repoint the IP address to the baby server. After its up we swap it back, easy peasy!
Click to expand...
I guess you got full control over your domain and servers. You'll probably change the proxy to point to another host. At the moment I have no idea how things are organised behind the scenes here. I don't know if it has load balancing or not, wether there is a possibility for continuous deployment/integration etc. I don't think so but we'll have to see. Maybe we don't control the proxy, I have no experience with cloudflare.
 
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Cloudflare has exactly the necessary tools and utilities for what I outlined. But no we don't redirect via a proxy. The public IP is homed to a load balancing cluster. The actual server IP's are private so we just redirect the public IP to a different internal IP via the hosting services control panel. Pretty basic functionality for any hosting company utilizing virtual hosts which is over 90% of the market. The nice thing is since we are not messing with a proxy, or worse, DNS, the changes are instantaneous with no need to wait for addresses to update across the network. It is also rather inexpensive. We host several well trafficked sites on 2 clusters. All for less than 400USD a year. And the smallest sites generate a lot more traffic and disk utilization than a site like this. Unfortunately the hosting market is full of shysters that charge an arm and a leg for services like that. You really have to pay attention to the fine print. "Unlimited" rarely truly means what you and I would think it does.
 
The redirection, isn't that what you would do with for instance a nginx proxy up front? Outside IP goes to the proxy, which redirects the adres to a server behind it. I usually work with a bunch of dockers behind an nginx proxy on AWS. Changes are pretty much instantaneous, so sounds a lot like what you describe here. Like you, we don't have to touch the DNS. I guess what you do on the panel could be changing the port forewarding, then you don't touch the proxy, but just point to another proxy. I myself never saw a hosting here in the NL that allowed you to do that for a relatively cheap price, apart from AWS that is. But as I said, I don't have experience with cloudflare and what they do.
But I'm not sure what is used here. Most consumers hosting don't have a fine control like that, usually they just only allow you to ftp code to the cgi folder and set up a couple of databases on one server.
 
Marcel said:
The redirection, isn't that what you would do with for instance a nginx proxy up front? Outside IP goes to the proxy, which redirects the adres to a server behind it. I usually work with a bunch of dockers behind an nginx proxy on AWS. Changes are pretty much instantaneous, so sounds a lot like what you describe here. Like you, we don't have to touch the DNS. I guess what you do on the panel could be changing the port forewarding, then you don't touch the proxy, but just point to another proxy. I myself never saw a hosting here in the NL that allowed you to do that for a relatively cheap price, apart from AWS that is. But as I said, I don't have experience with cloudflare and what they do.
But I'm not sure what is used here. Most consumers hosting don't have a fine control like that, usually they just only allow you to ftp code to the cgi folder and set up a couple of databases on one server.
Click to expand...
Yep, the setup I use is exactly the same in function to using an nginx proxy as you mentioned. Hosting pricing is literally all over the place. One thing I learned when shopping is never to assume the published prices are nonnegotiable. In fact if you call their sales force directly you can usually get up to 50% off the consumer hosting prices just by asking. By agreeing to a multiyear deal you can reduce your rate as much as 90% off the published rates.

I have no idea what is behind the setup here, have not really looked to be honest. I recall reading somewhere on an old thread that this site is hosted as part of Horse's business. I don't know if that is true or what exactly it means but the uptime for the forum has been pretty good. What seems to be missing until very recently is continuity in management. Meaning someone that can spend the necessary time and energy to manage the board and keep it tidy etc. Our existing staff have all done a yeoman's job in keeping it as good as they have. But it sounds like soon we will have someone able to get down into the main administrative side of things and do stuff like clean up the group build threads etc. Which is excellent news!

Oh and nothing I said was meant in any way as a criticism of those efforts! This place is a fantastic resource for which I am very grateful!
 
Robert Porter said:
Yep, the setup I use is exactly the same in function to using an nginx proxy as you mentioned. Hosting pricing is literally all over the place. One thing I learned when shopping is never to assume the published prices are nonnegotiable. In fact if you call their sales force directly you can usually get up to 50% off the consumer hosting prices just by asking. By agreeing to a multiyear deal you can reduce your rate as much as 90% off the published rates.

I have no idea what is behind the setup here, have not really looked to be honest. I recall reading somewhere on an old thread that this site is hosted as part of Horse's business. I don't know if that is true or what exactly it means but the uptime for the forum has been pretty good. What seems to be missing until very recently is continuity in management. Meaning someone that can spend the necessary time and energy to manage the board and keep it tidy etc. Our existing staff have all done a yeoman's job in keeping it as good as they have. But it sounds like soon we will have someone able to get down into the main administrative side of things and do stuff like clean up the group build threads etc. Which is excellent news!

Oh and nothing I said was meant in any way as a criticism of those efforts! This place is a fantastic resource for which I am very grateful!
Click to expand...
Yup, there are powers at work here and I just saw Horse online for fixing things. I don't think it will be taken as criticism. Additional insight of experienced people will always be valued, just bring it on :)
 
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Yep unplugging will shut it down, eventually in the case of a laptop. As for tech support, especially via phone, tier one is almost universally horrible. I dread calling to report an outage for my Internet supplier at home. They read from a script and will not deviate. The last 3 times went something like this:

Support: I am so sorry you are having a problem. Please unplug your modem and wait for 30 seconds then plug it back in.
Me: Okay. (Note I have usually done that at least once before I even call)
Support: Thank you! Do you have connection now?
Me: No, the following lights are on on the modem. (Describe the lights, usually the service light is off)
Support: I am so sorry can you please unplug your modem again?
Me: Okay.
Support: Do you have a connection now?
Me: No, the following lights are on on the modem. (Describe the lights, usually the service light is off)
Support: Please hold
Me: Okay. (Hold for from 10 - 30 minutes)
Support: I am so sorry you are having a problem, there is a network outage in your area. Support is working to restore service but at the moment they have not advised of as to how soon.
Me: Thanks! Bye.
Support: Is there anything else we can do for you today as our valued customer?
Me: Yes, please convince your network services people to advise you of outages so when customers like me call we don't have to do this dance each time.
Support: <click>
 
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