And there are/were a lot of them…

If you click the image above, it will give a better view of site speed over the last several months. Many of you have come across bewildering downtime messages & have experienced issues accessing the site from your mobile phones. Here is a brief timeline of what’s transpired. A lot of it is boring mumbo jumbo so you can probably skip to the end.

– In early-mid August, I switched off of Hostgator VPS & moved back to shared hosting.

– In mid-October, I enabled a service called Cloudflare which re-routes “bad traffic” like bots and spammers and clears the way for “good traffic.” Unfortunately, I had no idea that the service was blocking mobile users until this past week. More on that in a minute but, as you can see, other than an unrelated issue that arose in November, the service has made the site faster.

– What did happen in November? A user installed something called a rootkit on my old host’s servers (or something like that) and they had to do lots of re-configuration. This caused poor site performance and lots of downtime while they were fixing issues.

– On Thanksgiving night, I hired someone to transfer the site back to a VPS server, (supposedly faster and is more expensive). The major problem was that he did not optimize the configuration for WordPress and this caused a lot of issues over the first couple weeks.

– On December 1st, I disabled Cloudflare to see if that was the cause of the issues and that just made the problem worse resulting in even more downtime.

– Earlier this week, we re-enabled a second caching plugin for WordPress called WP-Super-Cache. This has resulted from erratic server resource usage between 40-70% to a consistent 25-30%. The site is really fast for me now though the Friendfeed widget in the top right takes time to load or doesn’t load sometimes.

– Also earlier this week, just as I thought things were resolved, the site went down for an hour as an issue arose at the server facility where Beernews is hosted. Of course, this was right at lunchtime on the East Coast which is the start of peak traffic time.

– Today, I lowered a security setting that I hope will resolve some of the mobile access issues. Cloudflare blocks most Blackberry IP addresses from what I can tell because spammers/bots use these to attack websites. Some corporate locations may be blocked for a similar reason. I have been able to whitelist a few IPs manually but with the amount of bots/spammers coming through with the reduced security setting, the legit user blocks are too hard to find and whitelist. You’ll have to email me if you are still having access issues (see below).

The main takeaways:

2) If you are viewing this ok right now but still can’t access the site from work or your mobile or somewhere else, please get in touch with me at BEERSAGE ~AT~ GMAIL DOT COM.