DLF Forum Downtime

[dlf_kenm]

So you are no doubt wondering what the heck happened to the DLF Forum. Why was it down this weekend, of all weekends?

About a month ago, we moved the forum to a new web hosting service. We were looking to move the forum to a new host in order to accommodate increasing levels of traffic. I identified a hosting service which I determined to be more than adequate to meet our needs, but as we soon discovered after moving there, they were not.

On Saturday, our new host shut down our site. They reported that our forum was generating so much traffic that it brought down their server, crashing a number of other websites with it. Furthermore, they refused to re-activate our site, nor would they migrate it to any other server as the result would be the same. They essentially killed us on our busiest day (which of course is why we crashed their server), and told us to find another host. Good luck, Jack!

Which we did that very night. By 3:00 am we were migrating files and the database to a new host, one which specializes in hosting this type of forum, and which provides excellent service and scaling.

However, Sunday brought another problem. The database file which drives this forum was so large, the host was having a hardtime importing the database. This is an issue I had encountered with a previous move, but the problem was much worse now that the database was even larger.

After working all day to successfully import the database, get all of the files right, and point everything to where it should, we are finally up and running again.

The DLF Forum was a victim of, among other things, it's own success. It's been made very clear to me by numerous hosts who looked at our data, this forum is exceptionally large and active. And it is that way because of all of you. So thank you all, for making this site so dang busy, and so exceptionally excellent, that web hosts everywhere tremble at our approach.

I cannot express enough how seriously we take keeping this site up and running. To have it fail on what might just be the most important day of the year for dynasty leaguers is just agonizing and unacceptable. But we now feel as though the hosts for our main website (which experienced similar growing pains last year before being migrated to a new high performance host), and now the forum, are now being hosted by the best, most specialized hosts we can find for these resources. we anticipate each offers the ability to grow and scale for many years to come. And I sure hope that is the case, because I tell you what, I don't need any more weekends like this past one. And I am sure you don't either.

Thank you so much to all of you who were patiently waiting for things to return to normal, and for all of you who help make the DLF community the best dynasty community around. Please stay active in the forum, sharing ideas, knowledge and discussing the game we all love so much. It's you guys who power us and make this all worth while.

You can't stop us, you can only hope to contain us... for a few hours.

Thanks, and have a terrific season!

KenM

[kris_kapsner]

No worries. I totally understand.

I was wondering what happened. But all that makes sense.

Thanks for your hard work in getting it up and going again.

[hotrod]

It happens. I'm in the web business and completely understand. Downtime sucks but growth is a good problem to have. Keep up the great work!