Errors accessing TLF, let me count the ways...

[88V8]

It was fast 30 mins ago,
Now it's not.

I posted on another topic, it appeared not to Submit then I got a warning that another post had been made... it was my post that had appeared not to submit.
Going to the dogs mumble mumble.

V8

[y0rkiebar]

I helped run a forum a few years back, I added some countermeasures to block out IP ranges to reduce the bot headcount. It was pretty effective and would automatically adjust the blocked IP ranges based upon most persistent offender rates. Without the countermeasures, spam was a major issue.

[Gerry557]

Thanks for the update.

I didnt expect so much "problem time" more of a move will take place in that time scale sometime and when it does there might be some "temporary issues"

I suppose I could come back and let you know what I got for Christmas

[stooz]

Hi all, and thanks for keeping us up to date on your experiences.
They are very helpful.

Essentially the hosting company have sold out to 123reg and we are in an open transfer to their servers. In that they won't give a time scale or details.

It's very frustrating as we are even struggling to contact them to get support.
This isn't acceptable for us either. I'm not the biggest fan of 123reg, and I think it's time to abandon ship and move to someone else.

Suggestions welcome!!

A lot of alternatives require full it skills to manage the servers where we use a managed server approach.

Many also won't support the size of the system, amount of page hits or other factors, without multiplying our costs 100 fold.

As soon as the platform backend transfer is complete and we can comfortably access all the systems, we will move.
Painful though that will be for a short period, we hope the grass is then greener elsewhere.

Moving will actually be easier than upgrading in situ, and we can implement a newer platform for the forums at the same time.

Thanks for your patience and enduring these issues.

We are certainly not ignoring the problem.

[mc2fool]

Hi all, and thanks for keeping us up to date on your experiences.
They are very helpful.

Essentially the hosting company have sold out to 123reg and we are in an open transfer to their servers. In that they won't give a time scale or details.

It's very frustrating as we are even struggling to contact them to get support.
This isn't acceptable for us either. I'm not the biggest fan of 123reg, and I think it's time to abandon ship and move to someone else.

Suggestions welcome!!

A lot of alternatives require full it skills to manage the servers where we use a managed server approach.

Many also won't support the size of the system, amount of page hits or other factors, without multiplying our costs 100 fold.

Yeah, well I left TSOHOST in disgust at their totally crap support a few years ago. I don't know if it'll suit but I went to https://hostpresto.com/ and have been quite happy with them.

However, I'm sure that TLFs resource needs are a great deal more than mine, but in any case, check out their Hosting options and their Servers options, and use online chat to them if you have any questions.

Matter of interest, what are TLFs resource needs? Disk space, monthly bandwidth, etc?

[scotia]

for the past few days this website has been telling me that it is unavailable
it constantly says as much when i try and get on

after numerous attempts it usually comes good but always i need to re enter pasword etc
despits always ticking the remember me box

this is a new issue for me....say over past 2 weeks???

is it a problem everyone is having or is it my system....and if its me....what and why??

Yes - I'm also suffering in a similar fashion with the lost connections and the need to re-enter my password, even although the remember me box is ticked. So I don't think you need worry about your system

[terminal7]

for the past few days this website has been telling me that it is unavailable
it constantly says as much when i try and get on

after numerous attempts it usually comes good but always i need to re enter pasword etc
despits always ticking the remember me box

this is a new issue for me....say over past 2 weeks???

is it a problem everyone is having or is it my system....and if its me....what and why??

Yes - I'm also suffering in a similar fashion with the lost connections and the need to re-enter my password, even although the remember me box is ticked. So I don't think you need worry about your system

Same here - but all well at the moment

T7

[stooz]

As stated we are being sold out to 123reg. They are doing a massive migration of all their servers to the new supplier. This is indicated that it will complete by 2025.

I am seeing a complete lack of regard to support requests any more.

Our issue is that we are also running an older version of the forum code which most new host firms won't allow. So moving supplier also requires a complicated data upgrade.
We do hope to find a solution soon.

[mc2fool]

As stated we are being sold out to 123reg. They are doing a massive migration of all their servers to the new supplier. This is indicated that it will complete by 2025.

I am seeing a complete lack of regard to support requests any more.

Our issue is that we are also running an older version of the forum code which most new host firms won't allow. So moving supplier also requires a complicated data upgrade.
We do hope to find a solution soon.

Yeah, well TSOHOST's support went downhill a long time ago and has obviously got even worse as part of the sale process.

But if you post TLF's system requirements, including current version of phpBB and the versions of php, mySQL, etc it requires, as well as the resource needs (disk space, monthly bandwidth, etc) I can check if my provider will support them ... although you could always ask them yourself, you'll find their online chat quite friendly.

(You did ask for suggestions, right?)

P.S. There doesn't seem to be a way for non-admin users to find out what version of phpBB TLF is running but I can see that the server is using PHP/5.6.40. HostPresto supports PHP 5.7 to 8.x (selectable per domain), so will the TLF phpBB version run under any of those?

[stooz]

Thanks, yes that would suit us. I am more than happy to take recommendations other wise I am just going blind by whoever appears in Google 1st

[mc2fool]

Thanks, yes that would suit us. I am more than happy to take recommendations other wise I am just going blind by whoever appears in Google 1st

Ok, well I can definitely recommend HostPresto from a support point of view, and from an "everything's just worked" point of view too.

Whether they'll suit TLF's needs at a reasonable cost I'll leave you to research.

(As I mentioned, I'm a fairly light weight user and FYI I just use their cPanel "Mega" package, from which I run three small websites (and all my email traffic), using just around 1GB of disk and 2-3GB per month of bandwidth. I'm sure TLF will need a fair bit more... )

[Mike4]

Yeah, well TSOHOST's support went downhill a long time ago and has obviously got even worse as part of the sale process.

Yes and this drove me to leave TSO Seven or eight years ago. I settled on Nethosted.co.uk who have been completely brilliant, mainly because if you call them the phone gets answered directly by a faintly grumpy tech bod who really knows his stuff. None of this "Press 1 for sales, 2 for accounts .... 27 for technical support" auto-messaging then hours on hold while they finish their coffee....

[stooz]

Thanks I will look at both of those. I just tried pesto live chat and no one answered...

[swill453]

After about a week of really good service, the site has really slowed down again for me this morning, with occasional "GET" failures. Can admin find out what might have changed to cause reversion to the bad state?

Scott.

[stooz]

We are still being upgraded so we are getting unexpected outages, which they said wouldn't happen.
Or apologies

[spiderbill]

(As I mentioned, I'm a fairly light weight user and FYI I just use their cPanel "Mega" package, from which I run three small websites (and all my email traffic), using just around 1GB of disk and 2-3GB per month of bandwidth. I'm sure TLF will need a fair bit more... )

Thanks for that link, I'll check them out for mine. Since I'm retiring I'll need far less than the dedicated server I've been running with Simply (used to be called Poundhost) at far higher cost, and which is now past it's end of life anyway. Just need to find time to migrate and update some old PHP code. Most of the old well-known hosting companies seem to be charging large extra fees for CPanel these days which pushes up the costs.

Will be interested to see what resources they have for fighting spam and would-be hackers, who now seem to take up about 90% of bandwidth along with AI bots and scrapers.

cheers
Spiderbill

[Itsallaguess]

We are still being upgraded so we are getting unexpected outages, which they said wouldn't happen.

Our apologies

Log-in issues and general board usage has been highly problematic again earlier this morning, with frequent issues regarding website errors, SQL max-users warnings, resource-limit is reached, database /GET warnings etc.

Stooz - Could you please consider that many of these recent issues are likely to be AI-bots overloading the site-bandwidth, rather than sticking rigidly to a 'the server is crap, and we're looking to fix that' approach to this problem?

Can you take a look at the Lemon Fool user-access profile for this morning, as when I looked 15 minutes ago (around 10.20am on Sat 16th November), the site was saying there were nearly 1200 users online when the regular access-issues were being seen - and now, when the site is looking to be behaving slightly better, there's only 809 users accessing the site, which I fail to see as a 'normal site access profile' for human users only over a small number of minutes...

I'm not sure if you've read up much on phpbb site-owners trying to handle AI-bot access, but there are several threads that will be worth taking a look at if you've not, as many of the site-owners are collectively coming up with strategies that look to be improving things, where similar bandwidth-related issues are being seen in recent months -

Bots eating up all the bandwidth - https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2654650

Claudebot attack - https://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=2652265

Key to some of the above strategies being used to block these AI-bots seems to be in using the site's .htaccess configuration to block out well-known and widely experienced browser user-agents that help to identify when those particular AI-bots access your site, so can I please ask if this is an area you've looked into, as it might be the case that even the current server and bandwidth performance might well be drastically improved if some of the methods covered in the above well-documented phpbb threads could be implemented on The Lemon Fool?

If the above issues have not been on your radar, and there's none of the above mitigation currently in place, I'd be a little concerned that concentrating just on switching servers due to these performance issues might not actually improve anything over the longer term, if a new server would only then continue to be swamped by what feels like a current and growing AI-bot issue, and it's certainly worth considering that some of the above mitigation-processes might well improve things to a point where the current servers might well still be good enough, and reading the above threads, where site-owners are declaring big improvements following the implementation of some of the blocking-strategies, seems to corroborate that possibility...

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

[y0rkiebar]

Yes, when I helped run a phpbb forum we found bots to be a big resource eating issue. I think we used a .htaccess file type approach to block well known troublesome bots, not sure if that's still viable as it was quite a few years back.