Martin as I said, the club website I administer costs less than £100 per year for website hosting and one to one tech advice. My wife uses the same setup via the same web host and runs her online business from it, including online purchasing.
Are you really surprised I’m interested to know why this club is paying £7500?
Well some good at last…a cure for insomnia !
I’m no expert on how these things work but I can’t help thinking this has to be something to do with the server that the forum is hosted on. The ‘Powered by YAF’ got me thinking. I searched out YAF and guess what? They have their own forum. I opened up a selection of threads on there and the slowest page was generated in 0.101 seconds. A slight improvement on 76.808.
I hope the National Committee took this issue seriously when it was considered last month (April) and did not just ask the webmaster to “tweak” a few settings to achieve a temporary fix. I got an error message three times while trying to post this contribution - enough to make one give up.
Could we have an update please? I appreciate that the site is a lot more than the forum and that impatient users can add to the overload problem but as far as I could see there were certainly fewer than 50 users logged on so it shouldn’t be misbehaving to this degree because of that.
No criticism of the Webmaster is intended or implied in this post.
David
It’s ironic that I got email notification of the new post and clicked to navigate to it and the page took 30 seconds or more to appear. Yesterday at work I couldn’t even open the forum. This has to be addressed or people are just going to go elsewhere me included.
Above post took 1 minute and 40 seconds then timed out with error 404.
Yesterday I tried to post to the forum 3 times. After waits between 2 and 4 minutes I received …404 …503…503.
The performance of this site is an UTTER DISGRACE !!
When I had internet service provider issues I changed provider. Problem solved.
How do we solve issues with this site?
I for one will be writing a Snail Mail letter to chair of MX5 committee stating that I will not be renewing membership as long as forum issues remain.
Genuine people assure us that “Top Brass” are aware of issues.
I FOR ONE WOULD PREFER A FUULLY FUNCTIONING WEB SITE TO A RANGE OF MX5 HATS
I am a member of a number of car and photographic forums…ALL free of charge…and ALL perform properly…unlike this site.
PLEASE get this sorted before we lose more membership.
(NOTE to Mods. In the interest of free speech and to gauge opinion please allow this thread to run it’s course)
Of course we could be victims of the “Cyber War”! Maybe we’re being hacked by the Lada OC on Vlad’s instructions!
Maybe change to a different hosting company. At least it will eliminate (or not) the part of it.
Sorry to bang on about this age old problem, the forum has slowed up again, gave up last night, still slow…
Will this post show?
Same here! Kept getting a “503” - Not Available - so gave up. Seems a bit better this morning though.
Forum has run without a hitch for me over the last three months or so but some sign of issue over the last few days.
Slowness to load at the start, posts slow to load and website dropped out or failed to load a few times. Something different this time I think.
Unfortunately this coincides with me having to reload windows and rebuild the software on my two main use laptops so not totally clear/confirmed that the website is the problem.
Yes it seems to be ok for niw. I too have had PC problems WIN10 updates are driving me to despair plus Firefox seems to have bugs and keeps crashing then the OC site…here!
My car even went into limp mode yesterday evening, dash lit up like fairy lights, at least it wasn’t the Mk3.
Get this quite often
About half a dozen times so far today!
Yes, after months of satisfactory web site operation, this past week has shown some of the old problems resurfacing - slow loading, not loading at all (404 NOT FOUND), have been common occurrences for me lately. I was rather hoping that the tech guys had finally solved all the problems regularly encountered earlier on in the year, but apparently not !
Blips on Thursday and Friday evenings last week are understood/expected.
But I gather you’re seeing issues still (e.g. as of today)? If so, I will need to investigate that some more.
The weekend became slower, and the usually fastest time (for me) of late Sunday night was so slow I gave up.
However, right now it is quick - this page posted in 0.708 seconds.
Going like a stabbed rat up here in Jockhanistan…no worries.
The couple of posts I have sent in this morning have worked OK - I was just reporting the problems I had experienced last week - adding my input to other members comments who had obviously had the same problems as I have recently.
Why, after months of almost perfect operation, no matter what time of the day, or day of the week for that matter, were the problems which you mentioned of last Thursday and Friday evenings ‘understood / expected’ ? Was there some maintenance taking place at those times which us ordinary members were not aware of ? If this is so, then perhaps warning us in advance of any such work might have been a good idea - you wouldn’t have got any reports of problems then.
Unscheduled maintenance on both those evenings, yeah., involving a server restart. The restart itself obviously takes things offline but there is then additional time before things return to normal as caches re-populate.
The root cause if you’re interested was issues with a routine renewal of the SSL certificate which seemed to cause IIS to hang for whatever reason. The Thursday was the original planned update (with no external impact expected) and the Friday was to so similar with the FTP site, which I can only assume failed to update correctly because of IIS hanging on the Thursday, necessitating another reboot.
We obviously try and avoid any issues like this and try to minimise them, and do them at non-peak times where possible. Where it can’t be avoided we try and send out comms in advance but that only works when it is planned and with enough notice for it to be helpful for people.