Uptime is vital
January 27, 2006 by Mary Jo Manzanares
Filed under Business
For the more serious bloggers or “webmastersâ€, we know that uptime is vital. Compare it to a shop front, if a McDonalds store had 900 people in a queue lining up to get their favorite Big Mac burger and the store burnt down. Well that would be bad for business wouldn’t it?
Same applies to websites, if it’s down then there’s no adsense monies for you.
I noticed Performancing.com had some issues last week which was obviously bad for business.
Warning: mysql_connect(): User knickerl_19 has already more than ‘max_user_connections’ active connections in /usr/www/users/knickerl/performancing.com/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 31
User knickerl_19 has already more than ‘max_user_connections’ active connections
What can we do to avoid this issue?
PLAN AHEAD!
Find a decent web hosting solution that offers 24/7 support, backups and some sort of uptime guarantee. If you are running your own dedicated server then read up on apache, make sure you know all the tips and tweaks to running a smooth web server and be sure the mysql max user connections setting is raised high!
Very much so.
I had a dedicated server over at ev1 but unfortunatly someone used my SMTP port to relay spam from. I personally hadn’t the knowledge to fix it and the support staff said it was out of their scope, so my blog had to go down for 2 and a half days
While this is certainly good advice one can’t possibly guarantee 24/7 uptime. Computers are man-made and therefore it’s inevitable they’ll sometimes fail. Then there’s routers and gateways inbetween which may also fail at times.
Yep I agree. Human nor machine is perfect. (who can tell I just finished watching the Matrix ..)
However mysql connections limit is certainly something one can plan for.
Let me guess: You’re hosting (or a client is hosting) with iPowerWeb? I had this same problem with a clients hosting over there.
Yesterday I saw MTV.com down, with a basic apache error message, for quite some time. I thought that’s costing them money…
Zach was talking about his ev1 server, which I also have but not the extensive knowledge to fix indepth server problems, that’s why I love dreamhost. (More space than ev1 and cheaper for the deal I got awhile back)
MySQL: my experience over the last decade of using mysql? Never use persistent connections to MySQL and you will probably never see that error message.
oops – and talking of uptime DIC is not responding right now – no pings no nuthin’ for the last 10 mins :(
Steve,
You sure it wasn’t your connection?
There is a MySQL accellerator and a few optimizers that try to buffer and protect against those issues. The names are eluding me, but it’s easy enough to sniff around for.
But my real question is this: how critical is uptime to a blog? Two days is harsh. But what is your acceptable cut-off? I work in the telecommunications space. 14 minutes is an eternity (and penalty heaven). But what’s the net loss, except for a bad user experience? Does that outweigh the technology expenses?
Sure, if it’s just some code-cleanup and some optimizing, that’s one thing. But if it falls out a bit, what’s the overall effect?