My server has crashed

Panic mode........

[Roadkill]

My server has crashed and I have been down for almost 24 hours. What will I do? No adsense.. nothing to monitor... no updates... eeek.... not to mention the cost, loosing ranking etc etc

I just sit here with a blank expression starring at the screen. This bites. Hopefuly they will have migrated my site to another server soon.

[jchampliaud]

This happened to me once with my hosting company, nothing to do but wait.
If I read you post right you 'self host' your site. If so, maybe you should think about finding a hosting company.

[Roadkill]

I do have a hosting company, but have been thinking about self host since there is 3.0+TB downloads per month. Maybe I crashed them, dont know yet.

[OptiRex]

there is 3.0+TB downloads per month.

Good grief Roadkill, what are you doing?

If I had that much traffic and my Adsense came in proportionately I would be in the UPS club every morning before breakfast!

I have thousands of images on my sites and get away with less than 30gb per month.

How much are you spending on hosting?

[Roadkill]

Images are one thing, try adding almost a gig of video and watch what happens. Inspite of all the downsloads I am not in the ups club. :(

As to cost, your going to die... 19.95 month I do not think this will last long, they are going to burn me one day based on downloads, Im sure. Just not yet.

[JohnKelly]

If you have a successful (revenue-generating site), consider having a duplicate site on a backup server. Then you can switch the DNS over to the backup server in case of crashing. I've done this before, using easyDNS I can change the IP address and effect the change in around 20 mins.

Round-robin DNS is also possible, but I have no experience with that.

[OptiRex]

19.95 month I do not think this will last long,

Your ISP is a bit slow to say the very least, you're costing them a fortune in bandwidth.

At that burn rate you'll get a good deal but at what cost? And I have no intention of adding video:-))

[sailorjwd]

My site was down for 18 hours on the 6th and now 1/3 of my pages are url-only in google :(

[moltar]

Maybe your host failed you purposely in hope that you leave their company and go somewhere else ;) After all, 24h recovery time is way too long for any hosting company.

With proper backups a server should be easily recovered in less than 2h.

[hyperkik]

My server crashed, coincident with a period of about 2 weeks when my host company 'accidentally' blocked all Google spiders, and it took about a month to recover.

[Roadkill]

Ok.... I am sinking.

I'm the one that crashed the system. with 3TB downloads. I dont know what I'm going to do. They wont re-establish the site cause I'll crash it again. So now I guess its going to be dedicated or something any HELP or advise would be greatly appreciated.

[MrAnchovy]

I've got two 1 TB/month sites with no downloads/images/etc... well, each has a 4kb logo image.

How much are you spending on hosting?

I pay approx $100-$150/month/TB on dedicated/unmanaged servers here.... which I find very reasonable.

As to cost, your going to die... 19.95 month

It may be too late in yourr case, but make sure you have backups of everything including anything that may be stored/updated @ the server level like a mailing list/db/etc.
I'd be very weary of the hosting company that allowed you to amass 3TB for $20... even of those who tout unlimited bandwidth, any company who has a clue as to what they are doing whould have put a halt to it long before you reached 3TB.

I'm sure everyone has their horror stories, but I've been the victim of a deleted site twice, (losing my entire mailing list db the first time) as a result of "budget" hosting. In just the few days of downtime to wait for DNS updates I ended up losing many times more than I saved.

any HELP or advise would be greatly appreciated.

There are plenty of managed servers out there from reputable companies... however, if you are ok with getting you hands dirty, and are willing to accept all responsibility for the server (ie. updates/firewall/etc/etc) unmanaged servers are very cost-effective.

[berto]

My site was down for 18 hours on the 6th and now 1/3 of my pages are url-only in google

My sites were down for 28 hours mid-week (a lightning storm and power outage fried my DSL modem).

The home page for one site is now url-only. (I can't say about other pages.)

Will this auto-correct over time? How long? Anything I (we) can do to hasten the correction?

[Loki99]

Roadkill,

Why don’t you tell your isp that you know what is causing the crash (bandwidth spike) and that you’ll fix it. Then remove the large files until you have a new place to host them.

But I guess you’ve already tried that.

[Roadkill]

MrAnchovy .... sounds like wise words. I will have to absorb it a bit and continue to educate myself rapidly. Fortunatly I had the forsite to have backups of everything, so I'm good there.

I have been heavily researching and learning about dedicated serving. Bye Bye 19.95 a month... been nice knowing you and the nice ranking I had going.

Loki99 .... Cant use that reason, they look at the history and it is an obvious trend. Just have to approach it honestly.

Keep the advice comming, its not waisted.

Thanks

[asinah]

Get 2 dedicated Linux boxes (around 200usd per month each) and pay the hosting company the fees for one year in advance (including the bandwidth needed).

You should be fine in the future.

[moltar]

You can get a server with unlimited bandwidth, but limited network throughput. Most big hosting companies offer that. For example, you can get a 10mbps line dedicated to your server.

In your case, I'd suggest asking the host if that is upgradable in the future. With your site you'll probably need 100mbps soon (if not already).

Once you get your own box, reconfigure apache to allow only 2 simultaneous connections from one user and install mod_throttle to reduce the load on your server.

Search this forum and protect yourself from hotlinking if you don't have it yet. As I am sure there tons of sites that link directly to your files, but you are not getting anything out of it.

Of course there are many other tweaks you can do once you get your own box. You won't get out of shell for the first week ;)