Comments on: Forum temporarily disabled, bandwidth exceeded, website dying, er, “help?”

By: nmailer

nmailer — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 14:27:48 +0000

I’m one of the Directors of Positive. Things seem to be progressing nicely, and the good Doctor has transferred to his new dedicated server. One of our head techies is giving him a call just to make sure everything’s running ok, that the backups are working and so on.

Some people above have expressed concerns about future capacity. This shouldn’t be a problem. We’re well used to running popular things on GNU/Linux platforms. For example, we did Ricky Gervais’s podcast, and that got us into the Guinness Book of Records for the number of hits it got. Perhaps this site’ll be next

Anyway, in the unlikely event that the site does begin to overburden the dedicated machine we’ve given Ben (he was previously in a shared environment), then we’ll give him an even more powerful one, or a cluster. This site is an important candle against the return to medieval darkness, so we won’t be the ones to let it go out.

By: tom1

tom1 — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 11:22:13 +0000

Wow! “Positive Internet” – does what it says on the tin.

I’m around and available if anything needs helping with. It sounds pretty well covered though.

By: manigen

manigen — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 09:26:29 +0000

Now that’s a good sign. The support team actually visiting the site, I mean.

By: pauls

pauls — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 22:41:39 +0000

Speaking as a member of the Positive Internet support team, we’ve just got the new server set up, and the details off to Ben this evening. I’m sure he’ll be contacting people for help over the weekend, but we’ll be here to assist too, in the short, medium and (hopefully) long term .

By: tom1

tom1 — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 09:14:47 +0000

Bootboy,

quite a few of us have been trying to assist Ben, but you’re the first poster who seems to be a specialist on the main issue.

As I understand it, Ben is off sorting out some alternative hosting with his new best mates at Positive Internet. Presumably with a few more horse power the site should at least be bought some time.

If Positive Internet are providing enough support to address the longer term issues then cool. If not, then perhaps some community assistance (hopefully intellectual rather than tin) may be necessary if Ben isn’t going to have to spend all his crack money on his website.

Tom

By: Andrew Clegg

Andrew Clegg — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 08:49:42 +0000

I remember the courgette one from the forums — nearly fell off my chair. Would definitely buy a t-shirt with that on.

Andrew.

By: bootboy

bootboy — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 22:36:04 +0000

Although it seems that Ben is well served already (yay) I can help out on the technical side if needed. I have designed and developed a couple of content management systems over the years, managed pretty large-scale internet infrastructures and know the insides of php, apache and mysql pretty well.

With your set up the rate limiting factor is definitely going to be the database – fancy caching mechanisms can go so far, but when you reach a certain number of visitors, and as your archive grows (meaning people arrive at diverse pages more frequently – pages which will not be cached), you soon reach a stage where you start saturating connections to shared database hosts.

The problem with this situation is that the upgrade path is not always straightforward. The reason that you are getting cut off is because you are sucking a disproportionate amount of stuff from the ISP’s big fast database server. You may find that, given the level of traffic, an upgrade to a virtual server makes the site impossibly slow. The only guaranteed solution that leaves you headroom for more growth is a multi-server set up with a dedicated database server. Problem being that that’s expensive.

By: tom1

tom1 — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 21:12:21 +0000

Ummm… What internet sites have you been visiting Gimpy?

By: Gimpy

Gimpy — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 19:51:05 +0000

For the t-shirt:

I’ve got a picture of Patrick Holford performing an act of onanism on a courgette cock.

By: coracle

coracle — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 17:22:19 +0000

I’ve got a design in the making featuring a very stylish double helix. I’ll have to get my arse into gear and finish it off.

By: tom1

tom1 — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 13:09:24 +0000

For the t-shirt:

A picture of Ben saying:

â€œI ran a double blind, peer reviewed study showing your quack medicine is junk, and all I got is this lousy t-shirt!â€

Tom

By: stever

stever — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 09:27:28 +0000

thanks to everyone for helping out.
And for giving me a nice little holiday from moderating duties.

By: Frank Chalk

Frank Chalk — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 08:59:57 +0000

Dear Ben,

As I have made a small fortune selling my patented WIFI Shields to schools who wish to protect their teachers and pupils against homeopathic radiation, I feel duty bound to contribute in order to help you out.

ps If you want to know more about the role of Crystal Healing, perpetual motion machines and Ley Lines in the new Science curriculum then pop over to frankchalk.blogspot.com

Regards
Frank Chalk

By: tom1

tom1 — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 08:41:15 +0000

Feel free to put my donation towards beer, or a stethoscope made of gold.

Glad you’ve got it covered. You know where we are if you need us.

By: seenoevil

seenoevil — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 08:21:14 +0000

Brilliant. Hope it starts soon.

By: Ben Goldacre

Ben Goldacre — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 23:13:27 +0000

woah

can barely get into the site myself

and busting up with dayjob work

briefly: got a server sorted i think, positive internet are the new gods, with a great track record of supporting geek political causes (eg they host richard stallman too)

lengthy grateful post and a serious lifetime of proper noisy public adulation to follow

i really dont need money, always happy to sub the site within reason, but anything that comes in will go to petty cash for podcast gear, expenses, sundries, and crack cocaine as ever.

this has been a v motivating experience and the new website will grow to be much bigger and more community. like the colquhoun thing i think more good will come of it than anything.

the best thing to come out of it has been some very good offers of help from some v sharp web people, and i really hope they stick around, theres some great stuff we could sort out, will post properly soon (but can barely get in to admin pages and dont want to clog blog with work-in-progress stuff).

i’ve also got a lot of great new content stuff coming, more to follow. also spending lots of time atm giving talks in various places and spreading the word on putting content free online. i think the royal statistical society for example are hopefully going to put some mp3 stuff up, which is great, the stuff ive been to there has been great. specialists talking to high end generalists is the future.

thanks again and no more money, to be fair, unless you just want to. i need your time, energy, and banter more than anything. viva etc. a new fast blog, a new bigger site, hurrrah!

By: SteveNaive

SteveNaive — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 22:59:21 +0000

Important stuff – keep it up – donation made!

By: Despard

Despard — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 22:03:03 +0000

I’ve already found two using a global search for “badscience”.

By: Alex McLean

Alex McLean — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 21:20:07 +0000

Perhaps you could create a facebook group, so we have somewhere to look for news / provide help if the site goes down?

By: briantist@work

briantist@work — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 13:29:53 +0000

Ben,

I’m always happy to help in my spare time – I can install/program/configure/maintain as necessary.

Anything to keep up the excellent work.