Just a quick heads up to everyone - I plan to move the site to a new server in the coming days. Although I've only been with the current host for about 9 or 10 months or so, I've noticed problems sending email through the forum on a couple of test boards (which means anyone registering won't get emails notifying them that their account has been activated, and anyone signing up for email notifications won't get messages either). I've found a new hosting plan through Amazon (yes, the same Amazon where you can buy whatever you want practically - they have a robust technology side as well) and will likely be moving things over in a week or two once I'm sure everything on the new server works the way I want it to.

As usual, the site might be unavailable for a short time after the move, but I'll do my best to work out any issues as quickly as I can.

Everything seems to be working well in my tests. I will likely move the site this coming week.

Can you let us know a bit before you do it? As far ahead as you can.

Currently planning to do it Friday night/early Saturday morning. I'm off on the weekends and don't have to be at work until early Monday afternoon so that should give me plenty of time to work out any problems that may occur.

I've already moved a few other sites and am not having any problems with them so I don't anticipate any issues this time around either.

TY

TY, Michael.

If you can see this message, the site has successfully been moved to the new server. Surprisingly it only took about 15 minutes or so for my computer to see it on the new server. The old server will remain up for a week or so until I make sure everything is OK. As always, let me know if you or anyone else you know of is experiencing any problems. You can reach me here or via email at oldiesmann@gmail.com.

I see this nice and clear.
I had no problem on the other discussions, so all is well.
Thanks for the great job Michael and have a great week end.

Michael...
...i too can see it...all seems as it should my end 

Micheal, all is well here. Thank you for taking good care of us!!

Thank you, Michael. It was a pleasure to come here and not encounter any of the usual issues.

tHANKS, MICHAEL!

One further update on things. Email is still not working (so you won't get topic reply or PM notifications) because the standard port for sending mail on the server is blocked (to prevent potential spam). I'm not sure how a test email I sent through one of my test sites worked but I have sent in a request to have it unblocked and should hear back about that within a couple days at the most. If they refuse that request there is an alternative option available, which is slightly more complicated but will allow things to work without issue. Either way, it doesn't involve moving the site any more so you shouldn't notice any issues.

Oldiesmann --- I got a PM notification earlier tonight.

That's good.

Amazon has removed sending limits and such on my server so hopefully emails will go out in a timely manner now. I also re-queued a bunch of emails that got deleted for some reason so you might get an old notification email.

Apologies for the slowdown the past day or so. It appears we're getting hit with traffic for some reason, which is slowing things down. I've disabled the ability for guests to view the forum statistics, as I noticed a lot of that activity happening, and will continue to monitor things as I can to figure out what exactly is happening.

Michael, I am sure you will figure it out. Thank you for looking after us.

Took some steps to ban some of the abusive bots at the server level, so hopefully that will help as well. I'm not sure why we're getting hit suddenly a month and a half after the move but it's getting annoying

Update about the slowness/unavailability the past couple of days: same issue as last time. Someone is repeatedly hitting the server with a bunch of traffic, but it's all coming from different IP addresses so it's harder to ban them. I'm working on banning them individually and am going to look into sending traffic through a third-party service first to help prevent this in the future (a company called Cloudflare offers free service for this sort of situation, and is quite well known, so I just need to look into what steps I need to take to get that set up).

Thank you for the update Michael.
I hope you soon succeed in blocking those "intruders", it is getting so hard to post these days because of the slow response.

I did some more research on the situation and it appears that Amazon is to blame here. Apparently they have their own "bot" that they use to browse websites in order to improve their services, and it seems to be what's hitting the site. I've taken steps to both block it and tell it to not browse the site, but it could take up to 24 hours for the changes to take effect. Hopefully we'll see some relief soon.

Looks like we're back to the standard speed for now. I'll still keep an eye on things over the coming days and see if the planned changes are actually warranted

You are a pro!  Thank you super-guru!

What Bubble said!!  You are an amazing guru also!!

WOW, the response on posting last message was super sonic!!!

Quote from: Oldiesmann on September 25, 2024, 01:32:44 AMI did some more research on the situation and it appears that Amazon is to blame here. Apparently they have their own "bot" that they use to browse websites in order to improve their services,

If they're doing that to S&F, aren't they causing the same problems with lots of other sites?  Maybe they're trying to take over other/all hosting sites. Wouldn't surprise me. Monopoly on everything.

Thanks, Michael!

jane

Unfortunately it seems the problem has returned. Despite me following the official guidelines for telling AmazonBot not to crawl the site and attempting to ban it outright, it's back with a vengeance. Still trying to figure out what to do short of banning all the IPs it uses (which is risky as I don't want to ban my own server's IP address), but hopefully things will be resolved again soon.

Thank you Michael, I have complete faith in you that this will be resolved.