BLF is now running on a new web host...

...and I hope you won't be coming very often to this status site from now on. ;-)


Updated Instructions for those who are still having trouble accessing the new server:
If you are not seeing the new site yet, please do the following:

1. Reboot your modem and router if you have one
2. Reboot your computer (easy way) or flush the DNS cache at the OS level (advanced users)
3. Clear your browser's cache

Thanks!

Going down for maintenance at 2:00 PM GMT

BLF is offline for a few hours as we switch webhosts. Thanks for your patience!

Testing a new server

Hi everyone,

We've been having a lot of problems recently with BLF being down, so I'm trying out a new host. I have heavily researched many, many different hosting options, and I think I've made a good choice. It is still fairly inexpensive compared to other options (this is Budget Light Forum after all :-) ) but its reputation among Drupal professionals and my own initial impressions have all been extremely positive. Please try it for yourself...

What you will see in the link below is a

VERY OLD BACKUP COPY

of BLF and is only

TEMPORARY.

http://budgetlightforum.sb73542.webfactional.com

From what I can tell, this new server is significantly faster than our current host. For me, the page /forum (the listing of the forum categories) on the new server is loading in approximately 60% of the time that it takes on our current host. Feel free to test it for yourself and please let me know how it works for you. I'm interested in knowing how the page loading and latency is for our users around the globe. If you want you can login and post as well. Please try to hit it hard to see how it holds up under load. Just remember that newer users may need to create a new account there since I did not load a recent backup but rather an old one by mistake. But it's only a temporary site that will be deleted, so please don't post anything there you want to keep.

If everyone likes the new host, I will try to make time on Thursday or Friday of this week to take BLF offline and switch over to the new host. It should take a few hours.

Thanks!

Site slow or inaccessible today

Intermittent outages all day. Host says another user on the server is creating heavy load. I'm researching webhosts right now.

Another 2 hour outage has ended

Again, our host imposed a 250 connection limit. At least they didn't give everyone a "Forbidden" error this time... and they didn't chmod anything. :-/

Long outage resolved

Hi everyone,
My apologies for the long outage for almost 12 hours. Unfortunately I didn't check the site after I returned home last night, I went to bed, and I found it inoperable this morning, thus the long duration. The problem was that the index.php file permissions somehow got set to 0000 (no permissions for anybody to access it whatsover). The big question now is how that happened. I haven't touched those permissions for a long time. I need to investigate this, and I'll let you know ASAP.
Sorry again,
Have fun.

---

Update: I confirmed that it was not a hacker or a site malfunction. The hosting company made an uncharacteristically bad decision of crippling the site to reduce system resource usage. I am currently taking up that issue with the hosting company.