Back online and upgraded!

[DNS]

Sorry about the down times lately. If you have seen our messages at Dhamma Wheel on facebook, then you already know what is going on. In case anyone hasn't seen that:

We got too big!! This is a good thing; for Dharma propagation, that is. We got so big that the shared server we were using was about to crash. The web hosting company shut us down, we were so big with too many hits per day. All of the TheDhamma.com websites are tallied together in terms of hits and Dhamma Wheel (Theravada forum), Dharma Wheel, and Dhamma Wiki were receiving thousands of hits per day, overloading the shared server.

So we have upgraded to a Virtual Private Server (VPS) Gold package which means that all TheDhamma.com sites will be on their own dedicated virtual server; not shared with other sites. We should be able to handle somewhere near one million hits per day without a problem from now on. Previously I thought that there needed to be around one million posts or so here at Dharma Wheel and Dhamma Wheel before we needed an upgrade, but guess I was wrong and underestimated the amount of traffic we were receiving.

[Huseng]

Thanks David for all your efforts and the fact you pay for this out of your own pocket.

[futerko]

Thanks David for all your efforts and the fact you pay for this out of your own pocket.

I second that

[Virgo]

Oh the site was down... I haven't been banned after all.

Great Job David, and everyone else.

Kevin

[Nicholas Weeks]

Well done David.

[Lobsang Jinpa]

Oh the site was down... I haven't been banned after all.

That was my concern at first. I was left wondering what I had said that could have been so offensive to earn a ban.

I'm glad that wasn't the case, and glad that the forum is back up and running.

[plwk]

And for the post re-opening obligatory lolcat blessing...

[mindyourmind]

Thank you, David.

[rose]

... We got too big!! ...

For a minute there it felt like E-Sangha revisited. All joking aside David your time and effort are greatly appreciated.

[PadmaVonSamba]

I thought I'd been kicjked off, then i did a DNS search and saw that DW was hosted by GoDaddy, which had a massive shut down problem.

It was a great teaching on impermanence!

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[Yudron]

The take away lesson for me from this, is that we who make actual posts need to remember that those who read the forum and don't post are the vast majority. Therefore, we should be ever mindful about what we write.

[Malcolm]

response time is definitely faster -- the old server was experiencing a bit of a lag at times.

[Ogyen]

Rock on Dharma Wheel. Back in style.

[shel]

Yeah it's super fast now.

[DNS]

Thanks everyone for the kind words. Something I mentioned over at Dhamma Wheel too:

Special thanks to our ordained Sangha members here, the moderating staff, AND all the lay people and other participants here. Any fool with a little money can start a website or forum, but it takes a great community to make it something this special. A website with no one visiting or participating is useless. It IS the community that we have here that has made this possible.



And yes, the new server is much bigger and better due to being a private server and therefore, faster. Otherwise you won't notice any changes in the format or structure, the web hosting issues are all just "behind the scenes" material that help make this work.

[underthetree]

Back and better than ever! And I was worrying that I'd broken it...

[zerwe]

[Dave The Seeker]

Thank you David for getting things back in order and making it better than ever.

[Zenshin 善心]

thanks David.

[viniketa]

Thank you for the space, David.

Just as an FYI, this as well as dhammawheel.com still seem to "drop-out" of name space, periodically. You might wish to have the DNS name server configuration checked.