What is happening with ChessTalk?

[Kerry Liles]

Hi Pierre,

No one here has a clue what VPS is . If someone has a solution I am certainly game. Basically I spoke to Lunarpages again this morning. Their response was that they were still working on it so the ball is in their court. Needles to say, this situation is unacceptable so by all means, contact me if you can solve this one for us. bevand at chess-math dot org ..

Larry

I think ChessTalk (when it is UP) has a decent amount of visits and web traffic (it isn't amazon.ca but it is a little on the busy side)
so the key thing is to find a host service that is more responsive and helpful than Lunarpages seems to be... I think Christian mentioned
to me once that Lunarpages is not in our time zone (to say the least) so that makes the response loop even worse than necessary, so
I would add another requirement: the host service needs to have business hours that correspond to Toronto/Montreal/Ottawa time.

Whether the host uses VPS (virtual servers) or even real hardware is not the problem here I think...

For what its worth, running your own internet-facing server is not for the faint-hearted - there are all sorts of issues that need to be addressed (security,
isolation from the rest of the internal network etc. being two of the most important).

[Egidijus Zeromskis]

Their response was that they were still working on it so the ball is in their court. Needles to say, this situation is unacceptable so by all means, contact me if you can solve this one for us. bevand at chess-math dot org ..

Without much knowing what is wrong, a simple suggestion go back to your backups. If you loose a month or two of posts nobody will notice

[Pierre Dénommée]

Hi Pierre,

No one here has a clue what VPS is . If someone has a solution I am certainly game. Basically I spoke to Lunarpages again this morning. Their response was that they were still working on it so the ball is in their court. Needles to say, this situation is unacceptable so by all means, contact me if you can solve this one for us. bevand at chess-math dot org ..

Larry

Basically, a virtual private server gives you more resources and more importantly, a guaranteed minimum amount of memory.

What Lunar page is telling you is that chesstalk brings down the speed of other web sites hosted on the same server. The cause is robots that either post on chesstalk, try to post on chesstalk or simply read chesstalk. Lunar host did stop many of them by blacklisting their IP addresses. Those bots are a big annoyance.

Changing to a better service is an attractive option. I can try to convince my supplier to give you a VPS at a lower price.

[Kerry Liles]

Basically just a bump to see what is happening (or not happening, I guess). A whole week without ChessTalk? Tell me it ain't so.

[Larry Bevand]

Basically just a bump to see what is happening (or not happening, I guess). A whole week without ChessTalk? Tell me it ain't so.

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A technician responded to your ticket with:

Hello Larry,

Thank you for your patience in this case.

We managed to fully audit your account and remove all known malware from within.

Also we have changed your main account/control panel and main FTP password.

Since you've confirmed that we may reset the credentials we will proceed with upgrading the outdated scripts found and will update this ticket with more details as we progress.

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Grr...So still no site...I will be giving them a call a little later when they are awake.

Larry

[Kerry Liles]

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A technician responded to your ticket with:

Hello Larry,

Thank you for your patience in this case.

We managed to fully audit your account and remove all known malware from within.

Also we have changed your main account/control panel and main FTP password.

Since you've confirmed that we may reset the credentials we will proceed with upgrading the outdated scripts found and will update this ticket with more details as we progress.

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Grr...So still no site...I will be giving them a call a little later when they are awake.

Larry

ChessTalk is back up around 3pm Eastern time (perhaps earlier... 3pm is when I noticed it was up) - I guess LunarPages finally was awake!?