• If you're a past member of the board, but can't recall your password any more, you don't need to set up a new account (unless you wish to). As long as you recall your old login name, you can log in with that user name then select 'forgot password' and the board will email you at your registration email, to let you reset your password.

Board closure earlier today

Karlin

Administrator
Staff member
Sorry about that! As a result of it going offline, I am in talks with my hosting service as demand for bandwidth for the site from users, was spiking above the level of my allocation on my hosting package.

I am trying to determine if this is due to a problem with how databases are set, or some software glitch, or from actual demand pushing the site up against the current limits on my account.

I checked the site statistics and found that in February, which was a relatively quiet month, we still had close to 39,000 unique visitors to the site, so it may well be that I just need to get a larger hosting package. :p I'm not quite convinced of that though so an engineer will check out the site logs to see if there's some other reason...

Karlin
 
Karlin, we had a bandwidth problem last month with our site and could not figure out why the site suddenly became so much more popular. Our IT guy found out that a new search engine was crawling through the site -- it has about 50 pages with some fairly dense content -- and that probably was the cause. That reasoning still does not make sense to me (some search engines do that almost every day or so), but that is what I was told.

39,000 unique visitors in a month is quite a feat, I think, for a single breed website.
 
Thanks Shirley and thanks Rod. :)

That is very useful to know your engineer's findings, Rod -- I think the same is happening, I looked at some records and there's an unnamed bot scanning the site and using far more bandwidth than the identified ones this month. I do have a robots file that bots are supposed to respect, but the rogue ones of course do not bother.

I will talk to my hosting site and ask if they can help me identify it and block the IP address or the name. I searched my records and the last time this happened was in Nov 2011 and I am on a medium level business hosting package that should be more than enough to cope with this single relatively small board (I was surprised at how the viewer numbers have risen :), but even in that context CavalierTalk is really small compared to many boards that might have hundreds online at the same time and be streaming videos etc). The fact that it has only happened ince before and again was desribed as a sudden surge makes me guess it is something like a bot. :mad:
 
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