Forum:Site outages
- Forums: Index > General discussion
There is discussion on the Shoutwiki blog and on the Shoutwiki Facebook page concerning the site outages:
- http://blog.shoutwiki.com/2013/09/the-current-situation-as-it-stands/#comments
- https://www.facebook.com/ShoutWiki
I am going to be bold and copy my reply below to the blog post linked above. This way the links are clickable, and I can be notified of replies to the discussion. I have my preferences here set to send me email when my watched pages (such as some forum topics like this one) are edited.
“ShoutWiki is a for profit organisation, however none of our staff members get paid for their work, they are all volunteers and all our income is reinvested into servers.” Wow, thanks for your efforts! It must be frustrating dealing with all this. Not even Jack Phoenix gets paid a little? He should. Lewis Cawte? Does Shoutwiki have a PayPal account or some other way for people to donate money? Feel free to cover my wiki with ads on all 4 sides.
I am curious about your server setup. Are all the servers, VPS (virtual private servers), software, and hardware used to host Shoutwiki, on internet hosting sites?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_hosting_service
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_server
If not, why not? Why go through the hassle of trying to buy and maintain hardware? That makes for difficult scalability, especially with bandwidth fluctuations, increasing need for space for images, etc.. Also, why did you increase the allowed kilobyte size for images? It was limited to 500 kilobytes maximum image size before. Now it is more. 500 kilobytes is large enough for almost anything I have ever wanted to do on my wiki, and I have many images on my wiki. I just use IrfanView to reduce the size and/or resolution of images as needed. Wiki farms can not afford to host large print-quality images.
“The web server has been using excessive amounts of CPU and RAM”. Is this possibly caused by DDOS attacks? That was mentioned in the Facebook comments:
- https://www.facebook.com/ShoutWiki – something about the possibility of a DDOS attack due to a wiki about Syria. Maybe that wiki can be moved to Wikia, and let them worry about it. :)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDOS
Maybe super controversial wikis that get all of Shoutwiki shut down should have their pages moved to big free hosts such as Wikia, Google blogs, WordPress.com, etc.. To those sites a DDOS attack is probably just a pinprick in most cases. Those sites get so many page views already. --Timeshifter (talk) 22:57, 15 September 2013 (UTC)
- I struck out the sentence about the old 500 kilobyte limit. I may be remembering that number from somewhere else. I thought for sure though that there was a 500 kilobyte limit for some kind of upload. Maybe it is for another wiki, or something. I don't know. --Timeshifter (talk) 02:35, 16 September 2013 (UTC)
