Soapchat down or not?

[That Bowie Girl]

I am having the same issues with the site being down more than it is up and running. When I am on it's running at a turtle's pace. I have talked to several others about this and they are having the same problems as I am as I see the ones who have posted above me have too.

@Pamela_E and Colin as the Administrator's of the site can you please tell us why the site hasn't been upgraded yet?

I would also love to know where our donations have gone since none of it seems to be going towards an upgrade which I was expecting when I gave my donation?

To add to this I am tired of never being able to come on at night which has been an issue here for sometime now.

Thank you in advance for your help.

 

[Pamela_E]

I am having the same issues with the site being down more than it is up and running. When I am on it's running at a turtle's pace. I have talked to several others about this and they are having the same problems as I am as I see the ones who have posted above me have too.

@Pamela_E and Colin as the Administrator's of the site can you please tell us why the site hasn't been upgraded yet?

I would also love to know where our donations have gone since none of it seems to be going towards an upgrade which I was expecting when I gave my donation?

To add to this I am tired of never being able to come on at night which has been an issue here for sometime now.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Upgrading won't help as its not software related. Your donation goes to the running costs of the site as the alternative was to shut it down permanently.

So your donations kept it running when it's cost one or two people around 40 thousand pound (probably more), over tne past 20 years for the forum alone.

Yes Im sure it's frustrating when the server goes down but unlike 5 or 10 years ago we cant afford £100 or more a month on a dedicated server with 24/7 support.

The alternative was to shut it down and move it to Facebook.

 

[Pamela_E]

Is there no way to program some script that reboots all automatically every day at 8:05pm?

There is no script,sadly.

But instead, we can set up an email alert. Details coming.

 

[That Bowie Girl]

Upgrading won't help as its not software related.

I keep getting this message.........

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, root@localhost and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

That is why I was asking about updating the server. Does the error log show why?

So your donations kept it running when it's cost one or two people around 40 thousand pound (probably more), over tne past 20 years for the forum alone.

I have no problem with sending in donations which I have already done to keep the site running and I think it's great that only 2 people were paying for the site for all us of to enjoy for all those years.

I am floored at how much you were paying? I may be way off base with what and how you had to pay but I am going by the fact that I used to own my own website. I payed for the copyright for the name. But to run the site it only cost me 12 dollars a month plus I paid 5 dollars extra to have more bandwidth. So to say I am shocked at this is an understatement. I was on a dedicated server thru a web host that was funnily enough in England. My site was exactly like this one plus it had 100 arcades, private chat rooms and each member had a place to create their own photo album.

Yes Im sure it's frustrating when the server goes down but unlike 5 or 10 years ago we cant afford £100 or more a month on a dedicated server with 24/7 support.

I don't know much about the workings going on behind the scenes of course but I just wanted to say that with Ome who puts so much time and effort into keeping this up and running the best he can and all the things he does to change up the site to keep it fun and then with Jason who supports us all...........isn't that 24/7 support? I do know that at times when the site goes down they have no control over getting it back up and running. Why not give them more support to help us? Wouldn't that end up helping you in the end? But again I have no idea how they would feel about doing this?

The alternative was to shut it down and move it to Facebook.

I know that I am talking to you as just a member here but I would hope that you would talk to the members before you ever went ahead and did this. You never know a few of us could band together and help to keep it going as we are all trying now with our donations.

I would never want this to happen! I have many good friends on here and Facebook just wouldn't be the same.

But instead, we can set up an email alert. Details coming.

This would be awesome and thank you! Jason did already set this up and every single email goes to him when the site is down so it would be nice to have another contact to help him out..again this is all just my opinions. He may say it's all good but I hate waking him up at 6 am!

I really appreciate your taking the time to talk to me about this and I do hope that our donations will keep this site going for many years to come!

Here's to the next 20 years!


EDIT: I forgot to add that my site never went down and my web host posted to us when the site would be offline while he did updates to it.

 

[Pamela_E]

It's not a website, hence the costs. When you have a forum and a large database, you have lots of costs to deal with. Not just in terms of storage but bandwidth and load.

In the past we had our own server, especially during our earlier years and when Dallas was on TNT. It was the only way to run it.

What are you doing when you get that error message?

I have not seen it, so hard to replicate.

 

[Matthew Blaisdel]

I have still several screenshots from (even over) 10 years ago with "soapchat database error" screens several times a week, downtimes that lasted for hours and hours and hours, so it wasn't better then.
It was always like that from the time i joined somewhat 2005ish.
And don't get me even started with losing the whole content from 10+ years because noone bothered to make a backup...
And it's the only forum on the whole net where i ever expirienced that, and i've been on over 20, smaller and bigger ones. Sorry to have to say so, but it's true.

 

[That Bowie Girl]

It's not a website, hence the costs.

But every site that is on the web is called a website.........this one can be called a forum because the definition of a forum is where people gather together to talk about similar interests. I do my research on things that interest me and you can find out anything you want to on the net.

For example:

soapchat.net is 1 decade 7 years old. It has a global traffic rank of #1,990,752 in the world. It is a domain having net extension. This website is estimated worth of $ 720.00 and have a daily income of around $ 3.00. As no active threats were reported recently by users, soapchat.net is SAFE to browse.

Updated 5 hours 55 minutes ago

The 3 dollars does not include our donations.

There is a ton of info out there on the site. I could post almost everything you need to know about it.

When you have a forum and a large database, you have lots of costs to deal with. Not just in terms of storage but bandwidth and load.

I do understand all of this because my site was exactly what your talking about. I also know that when the site goes down sometimes it can't be reset in the control panel and that is when it's usually down for days. So this is saying to me there is a glitch in your control panel or your server. This site does really needs a dedicated server because of the traffic it has caused by guests and the robots but I am not saying this is cheap either. My site was on a dedicated server but it was private people could only read the main page and had to join to read anything else. There were no robots etc on mine.

I also had a web host who took care of site maintenance and any glitches that came up so we didn't have down time. Once a week he took the site down for about an hour but he would post what time and day he was doing this so members were aware that the site would be offline.

From reading Matthew's post above I can see that this has been happening since the site came up? I don't know I have only been a member here for 5 years..........2 years of which I was off the site.

What are you doing when you get that error message?

Trying to log on SC and this message comes up or sometimes it says can not connect to server.

I guess one of my points is that we as members that are now donating money to the site I feel should know how much your getting to run the site and how much more is needed to get on a dedicated server or a way to get the site maintenance so we don't have so much downtime?

Or maybe it's just me that wants to know?

Thanks!

 

[Pamela_E]

But every site that is on the web is called a website.........this one can be called a forum because the definition of a forum is where people gather together to talk about similar interests. I do my research on things that interest me and you can find out anything you want to on the net.

For example:

soapchat.net is 1 decade 7 years old. It has a global traffic rank of #1,990,752 in the world. It is a domain having net extension. This website is estimated worth of $ 720.00 and have a daily income of around $ 3.00. As no active threats were reported recently by users, soapchat.net is SAFE to browse.

Updated 5 hours 55 minutes ago

The 3 dollars does not include our donations.

There is a ton of info out there on the site. I could post almost everything you need to know about it.



I do understand all of this because my site was exactly what your talking about. I also know that when the site goes down sometimes it can't be reset in the control panel and that is when it's usually down for days. So this is saying to me there is a glitch in your control panel or your server. This site does really needs a dedicated server because of the traffic it has caused by guests and the robots but I am not saying this is cheap either. My site was on a dedicated server but it was private people could only read the main page and had to join to read anything else. There were no robots etc on mine.

I also had a web host who took care of site maintenance and any glitches that came up so we didn't have down time. Once a week he took the site down for about an hour but he would post what time and day he was doing this so members were aware that the site would be offline.

From reading Matthew's post above I can see that this has been happening since the site came up? I don't know I have only been a member here for 5 years..........2 years of which I was off the site.


Trying to log on SC and this message comes up or sometimes it says can not connect to server.

I guess one of my points is that we as members that are now donating money to the site I feel should know how much your getting to run the site and how much more is needed to get on a dedicated server or a way to get the site maintenance so we don't have so much downtime?

Or maybe it's just me that wants to know?

Thanks!

Sorry but you don't know what you are talking about. What a load of balony.

For one doing a web search using Alexa gives incorrect info. If you were as clued up as you make out you would know this.

Are you suggesting it runs invisible ads that make the amazing sum of $3.00 a month? Alexa also has no idea what bandwidth we use. It's an automated system which is completely unreliable. Have a look at all the discussions on reddit about how crap it is.

If you really think a normal passive website is the same as a forum I suggest you google again.

Not only does a forum take a huge amount of bandwidth, it's also resources like ram and cpu which it stretches to their limit

A forum such as our uses a server, it's a shared enviorment. As stated we did have a dedicated server which costs 100's of dollars a month.

A shared server, one specifically built to handle forums, has one or two other forums. Thus spreading the cost. When bandwidth excells due to traffic spikes it means the resources are sucked from elsewhere. At that point our part falls over.

It's not server downtime or maintenance, it's unpredictable, and traffic related. Even on a dedicated server we had issues when 100's of people hit the server in one go after Dallas TNT finished every week.

So no it's not software and there is no such thing as a control panel issue. Control panels are simplied interfaces to manage content. I can bypass the control panel via SSL.

The issue is purely traffic related.

The only other issue have had is corrupt tables in the database, which was easily fixed in Phpadmin.

But downtime is simply bandwidth related and the only fix is paying more, which isn't going to happen.

A tiny website on Hostgator can not be compared to a forum due to the resources it uses. Hence the reason only specialised companies are preparared to host them.

 

[Pamela_E]

The forum has been stripped back today due to excessive calls to the database.

It should improve the speed. But it has meant images are restricted to two per post with a size limit of 2MB. You will need to optimize images if you find they are too large.

We also made some backend changes.