Our hosting service has been upgraded

Peter

Peter

Administrator
Joined
Jul 14, 2018
Apologies for the recent downtime on our main site and forums, but we have now fully migrated over to our new hosting servers. We still remain on a shared hosting platform, but we are top of the bracket, with the best you can get. We were previously on a Shared Plus package, but we are now on the Shared Business Pro package, which includes a high performance server. I am hoping this will suffice for the weeks and months ahead.

If it's not enough, then we will need to look at alternative arrangements, such as VPS servers. Dedicated servers are out of the question for a site such as this, due to how expensive they are, and the average traffic we would get over a 12 month period. I always said i would be honest and upfront with the costs of this site, so the breakdown of the Business Pro 12 months cover comes to $271.44. Our weekly streams have raised $200 in the past 10 months, so thanks to the generous donations and subscriptions from viewers, the offset for myself to pay was $71.44. I also need to cover the domain costs, as well as the XenForo license but that's still on me. I am happy to keep covering that, and thank you so much to those who kindly donate and subscribe! You guys are amazing!

Also a personal thank you to all of the staff behind the scenes for helping out with this, as well as forum member @LemonHaze who proved himself invaluable today in particular. Going forward, we are still not stopping as we prepare for Shenmue 3. We will be looking at the staff levels of the site , as well as the site and forums themselves to see what improvements we can make. I will also be finishing up the remainder of the History section within the coming weeks (currently at over 15,000 words plus images), and also, moving a lot of our content to a CDN to help take more stress off of the sites servers in anticipation of any sudden spike in traffic. I said the site wouldn't crash under my ownership, and i am still so humbly sorry that it did in March with the release of the MAGIC 2019 Shenmue 3 trailer. Finally, we have some site and forum tweaks which we will keep under wraps for now, but once again, thank you all for being here and for supporting this amazing franchise.

The story goes on...
 
Thanks for your efforts in keeping this free website online.

I can't remember if I've posted this before, I think I wrote a really long post once about it and didn't actually post it because I didn't think it was good advice. Since you mentioned it though I'll bring it up now. I switched to a VPS for my own website about 10 years ago. Prior to that I had used free hosting from 2001 to 2003 and low cost shared hosting from 2003 to 2009. At the time, I got a VPS because I was writing an iOS game that I wanted to include online multiplayer for and needed a server to host it. In the end, a combination of lack of motivation and lack of time but a desire to still finish the game resulted in online play getting cut but I stayed with VPS because I liked being able to install whatever I wanted. At one point I had my own SVN server, but GitHub made that unnecessary and now I just use it for Web + Email which means I don't really have any advantages from being on a VPS.

At the time I switched to a VPS, they were still relatively new and so there were a bunch of small new companies offering unmanaged ones for prices under $10 USD monthly. At that time I was less than a year out of college and still paying loans so I was cheap and managing the server myself was not a big deal. The only problem with small, new companies was less than a year later the provider I was using got purchased by another, then random problems would happen. I think eventually the server was completely lost at one point due to problems and I had no choice but to switch providers. I've been on my current provider since 2011, and they're also a budget priced + small company even though I could probably switch to something better at this point. I'm still paying a lot less than you do, but my resource use is low. The company I went with appears to have been started by one guy because any time I submit support tickets he's the only one who has ever responded. Apparently it never grew big enough for him to turn it into a proper business because he stopped accepting sign ups a few years ago and I guess he just keeps supporting the customers he has. Aside from resolving network issues that happen maybe once a year, I don't hear much from the company and I don't think he watches it too closely unless someone contacts him. Last year I ended up paying my bill 3 months late because I never got a notification that it was due - I just randomly logged into my billing CP one day and saw it. He never tried to remind me and my service wasn't shut off for not paying. This year I remembered when my bill was due and went and paid it early.

In short, it's nice to have a VPS and you can get them for cheap but I don't recommend actually getting an unmanaged server for a site like this given you have to stay on top of security patching yourself. I have been hacked before, due to unpatched software, and it required me to waste several evenings re-installing everything and contacting AT&T's network operations because they had blocked my server's IP entirely from their network so I couldn't even check my email from my phone while it was blacklisted. This is part of the reason I don't have wordpress installed anymore and disabled account features in the CMS I use for my main page.

If you went the budget VPS route it would definitely cost more than you're paying now, just due to best practices. With shared hosting providers they usually have multiple servers to balance load, so with a VPS you'd probably want two in different data centers to help users in different regions get the best experience. You could probably find hosting for less than the $271/year you're paying now, but there's always the risk with the cheaper ones like I ran into with my first / second provider.
 
Yep, i did toss and turn over the decision, but i decided against it in the end for now, mainly due to the reasons you have specified. It's an option that is there in the future, but for now i will see how things go.

Our CDN is also up and running, so fingers crossed end users see an improvement on both the main site , and forums load times.
 
I'm not surprised by this news for reasons I mentioned in my previous post, but it's kind of sad that less than a week after I talked about the VPS provider I've used for the last 8 years I got an email from the owner today saying the company is closing in 2 weeks. Oh well! Also, my original post was actually wrong. I've been using their VPS service since 2009. I found my sign-up email, and I had been using my first 2 VPS services for 2 months, not two years. It's amazing how time just compresses together when it gets far away.
 
Last edited:
2 weeks? Is that enough time to migrate? Any idea who you will go with?
 
Peter said:
2 weeks? Is that enough time to migrate? Any idea who you will go with?
Click to expand...
It will only take me an evening or two to completely set everything up on a new server. I can set everything up in advance and cut-over the domains afterwards to avoid any downtime.

As far as where I'll go, I don't know yet. I loved the flexibility of having an unmanaged VPS, especially because of how much manual configuration I have for email filters given the amount of spam I get for having a publicly posted email address, but at the same time I was never satisfied with my ability to stay up to date on installing software updates. I noticed there are hosts now that offer "managed VPS" that are not actually managed VPS, but actually private VMs with web based control panels installed where they don't even give you access to terminals to install / configure your own software.

I found my existing host from the forums at webhostingtalk.com, which is still around today and I see a lot of options that are better than what I have now at similar prices. Whatever I do, I'm going to go with a provider that has been around for at least several years. I'll probably decide on something next week.
 
As someone who’s been tryna avoid spoiler talk, I wanna applaud you on creating the new sub-forum ?
 
Feel free to have a discussion in here about when you folks want it opened? I mean when the next trailer hits? Gameplay footage? Everyone has different ideas about what constitutes a spoiler, so it would be good to get some sort of consensus.
 
For me spoilers would be anything relating to the actual game. Mechanics, locations, features, story, characters, etc.

I don’t mind getting involved in discussion about it as a product (eg platform releases, saves being carried over, the Kickstarter campaign, etc) but yeah, I wanna be able to play the game with no expectations. That’s how I enjoyed the first so much, and the inverse ruined quite a few things in Shenmue II. Don’t wanna make the same mistake again!

I get it if most only want spoilers to cover story-related shit though.
 
Peter said:
2 weeks? Is that enough time to migrate? Any idea who you will go with?
Click to expand...
I ended up going with buyVM.net. Someone posted a nice 7 year review of them on the WebHostingTalk forums about a week ago, and they were one of the options that met my needs and didn't have any negative reviews that stood out. Still fully unmanaged, which means I had to install the software and set up everything myself. This is actually the first virtual server host I've used that lets you upload an install ISO for an operating system, most only let you use from a list of OS's with pre-built images that they provide.

The server is set up and all of my sites are set up and running on it, but I haven't switched the domain names to the new server IP address yet because I figured out while testing email today that they're blocking SMTP ports in & out and I need that to be able to send email. Their standard support hours seem to be Monday - Friday, so I'll probably cut over sometime during the week once they unblock the email ports for me. It took me a couple hours to install all of the software and I configured everything + uploaded sites the following evening. Then spent hours troubleshooting random problems related to things I had forgotten but eventually figured out.

Just wanted to provide closure on this regarding what I ended up doing.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top