Improving the Lodge

The Lodge is now Speedier

Speed RacerSome of you may have noticed an improvement in site performance, i.e., page and image load times – over the last month or so. I had two most fortunate things happen in the past two months.

First off, my VPS host upgraded all of their plans by lessening the amount of accounts per server, in turn increasing the amount of shared resources available. End result, I was given a little more memory and CPU juice — both of which this site needs in large supply in order to run like a champ. And by the way… I’ve dealt with a plethora of webhosts over the years, and these guys are tops. I highly recommend ServInt to any of you who may be looking for ‘managed’ VPS hosting. They f**king rock. The performance is stellar and the support even more so.

Next… early last month I had a gentleman contact me regarding sponsored CDN service. For those of you that don’t know what a CDN is, don’t feel bad… I wasn’t really all that familiar with the service myself.

He sent me an email that read something like this…

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Special thanks

…to those of you who went the extra step to thank we with a monetary token of gratitude in regards to my semi-rant concerning my hosting woes. Considering the whopping $89 I have to cough up each month for VPS hosting to power the HL, every little bit helps. 🙂 In fact, thanks in large part to one very generous …

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I Was Not Prepared

WoW.com strikes again

While trying to update the site yesterday, I started getting these horrendously long load times, time-outs and finally error messages when attempting to navigate anywhere within the site. I’m accustomed to short periods of downtime due to high server loads, Apache reboots, and what not, but then this started to get a little too excessive for my liking.

I began firing support tickets over to the server admins to get this whole thing sorted out. Meanwhile, I’m still trying to access the back end to reply to the previous day’s comments. After several minutes I finally managed to get the admin area to load and what’s the first thing I see when I look at my recent comments…

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Your input is needed

I just want to make a quick post asking if any of you have experienced troubles with the site over the past few weeks. For example, slow page loads, failed page loads or other errors/problems. I’ve already had to upgrade the site to the next tier VPS plan, which is something I didn’t want to resort to, due to the …

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We’re Out of the Woods

Out of the Woods

…or at least I think we are. There may be some minor things to address, but the bulk of it is behind me.

After the nightmare that was my upgrade to a VPS server, I’m happy to announce that HuntsmansLodge is back up and fully operational. 🙂

Those of you that follow the blog may recall me having mentioned some weeks back that upgrading to a VPS was in my imminent future. I had been warned a few times over the past few months that my site was violating my hosting company’s Terms of Service by using up too much of the server resources. I tried optimizing the site further, but to no avail. Not only was I no longer welcome on a shared server, but I had my neighbors calling the cops on me when there was a party and the site saw a traffic spike.

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