vBulletin DB Maintenance and Promotion [Archive]

Lima Bean

04-28-2008, 11:51 AM

Not sure if this is the right place for this....

As my site continues to grow, I am moving toward letting Themes by Design keep our upgrades and themes in working order, and moving my attention over to database maintenance and promotion.

With that said, some of the negative feedback I have heard in the past year on other sites centers around lack of maintenance, especially on large sites.

I was in Go Daddy today looking a the Google Webmaster Tools, and staring at the 9 MySQL databases I have in reserve, wondering how to make absolutely sure we do not become unstable and affect our customers.

Obviously, this will be the area I focus mostly on in the coming weeks, and have already started backing up 3X weekly.

Just wanted to throw this out on the table for feedback from those who have been there before.

Howdy madmax;

Not sure exactly what you are looking for as far as 'maintenance' of your databases, but you did write something that caught my eye and so here is my opinion of how you can instantly help not only your site, but your customers.

As a guy who just sold a regional/community discussion/social site that grew to 50k plus posts and 219 active users in four months, I can echo your concerns on the database quandary. Please, please, please .. I am not attempting any type of controversy or bashing here, but you wrote the "G" word, and here are my thoughts on that.

You did not mention if you were shared or vps or dedicated, so for the sake of discussion I will <cough> assume that you are on a shared server based on the number of databases you mentioned, which indicates shared hosting.

I was with Godaddy in the beginning of my last project. Great registrar, good place to get domains, but frankly, lousy hosting and hosting plans. the adage that you get what you pay for applies, IMHO. The way that "G" has their shared hosting going, they overload their servers to the point that my smallish forum began bogging down right away. I used an on-line SEO tool to check, and sure enough, "G" had loaded 2100+ domains on the same server. End result was that I was consistently seeing 8 and 9+ server load averages at critical times, and the site was getting very slow very fast.

A thought on the database itself is that they give you a few, but when you set them up I am sure you noticed that you hook into them on their sercurverserver.net domain and not the server you are hosted on. This is just my personal opinion, but I believe that "G" does this so that they can cram more domains onto the server. I base this belief on the fact that my vb errors logs were chocked full of dropped errors and could not connect errors. When I did move off "G"s shared hosting and onto their vps hosting, these errors did drop by a good 90%, which I believe was because the databases were then hosted on the same server the domain was on.

"G" is very inflexible on what you can load onto their shared servers. This means even if you could sneak a database backup script onto the server, you most likely won't be able to use it because the way the databases are setup, you can't do a remote connect to them other than the control panel. A further disadvantage is that you can not SSH or Putty into a "G" server and grab your log files and backups automatically like I can do with my current ftp software, which is scheduled to log on and retrieve the logs and database backups very early in the mornings.

I tried "G" vps hosting and lasted all of three weeks with them. Absolutely no support and their standard tech replies always seem to be along the lines of - upgrading should fix that - . ugh.

So I guess the short of it is that if indeed you are using "G" shared hosting, consider an alternative hosting service that will give you a full fledged cpanel (in my opinion, the best) and access to the root of your hosted domain. Your databases will be right there in front of you on your hosting space, plus you will have the ability to auto-magically do your backups and maintenance. I have a database tool that allows me to remote connect to my database and manipulate my data into tables and reports any way that I wish, quite powerful but only usable if you can do the remote connect.

Again, this was not and is not a rant or tirade at Godaddy. It is what it is, and that is your hosting provider is the foundation of your site, and there are better and more efficient providers out there. Bonus features of improved hosting will be that you will have better access and ability to protect and defend the database and data that is crucial to the success of your community.

I hope that there were one or two little nuggets of info in this booklet response that might prove to be helpful.

Regards,
Lima Bean