Redirects and recent website trouble

Chris

Administrator
Staff member
Hi Folks,
I am going to paste this post I made in another thread so people can see what has been happening the last 2 weeks with the site being down some as well as having the annoying redirect issue to ad sites. Here's what I typed in another thread:

Well, to break this down over what has happened the past couple of weeks is that we moved to the new Wordpress site from the old ColdFusion based website. The Coldfusion site was basically one that I had to spend hours and hours each day updating cfm files, adding paragraph breaks, etc. and then finally uploading to the Internet. Then I had to post them on the forums and then finally social media. So, every night during the week and weekend it took 2-4 hours to update the site depending on how fast I worked and how long it took me to put up the new articles.

The new Wordpress site runs best on Linux, not windows like CodFusion does. So, we had to make the move to the Linux large shared hosting account, which turned up to be inadequate for RF because we get so many visitors a day. Just in the first day or two we ere maxing out or allotted connections to databases, etc. So, the next thing to move up to was a VPS. That we made the change to because both the Wordpress and forums software we use run better on a Linux server. So, we are now currently on a VPS server. whereas before the ColdFusion site was running on a semi-dedicated server.

When we moved to the VPS, it was a base VPS with 2GB of RAM. We have since had to move it up to 4GB as I had started getting out of memory error messages. I got another one Saturday, but none today. So, I'm going to see if they think we need to move up one more time to solve the problem. Then they changed the DNS servers to point to the new VPS machine using custom namesevers but the numbers did not match that they entered into my GoDaddy account. So, they changed that Thursday when I complained about the redirects. That was when they discovered the IP addresses were wrong. So, we had a little human error here.

No, the last 2-3 days we have had to have DNS servers from various ISPs across the Internet to update their systems to reflect the change. And this is why some people were able to get on and some where not. Even I could not see RF for hours at a time. Now, I have not had a problem today at all using Firefox. And no problems in IE as well. So, I think the problem is resolved. But you need to delete your browser cache, cookies, and flush your computer's DNS settings. Clearing the browser cache and cookies is relatively easy. But most will not know how to flush their DNS cache on their computers. Here's an article that explains it:

https://www.hostmysite.com/support/info/flushdns/

So, hopefully we will not have any more problems and no more moves for a long time. I have been very busy this weekend improving the website and do things to help speed the site up. I have optimized in Photoshop a few images that needed to be compressed and cut down on the server requests that the front page of the site was making through social media widgets. I have deleted those and cut the server requests down in half. I also installed a CDN on the site to help make the site faster to people around the world. So we are using MaxCDN services now to help deliver content to people faster and closer to them than from a single point of origin out of Phoenix, AZ. Now our content and graphics is sent to users from the nearest server to help speed up the delivery of web content.

I have been able to reduce page load times from around 4-5 seconds to down to about 1 second on average. So, I am always busy working on the site and trying to make it a better place as well as using the simpler and more easy to use Wordpress to make updates to the website.

so, I hope this helps to explain the problems I have had and have been dealing with over the last 2 weeks. The first week was spent on the shared hosting that turned out to be inadequate for us although I was told it would be fine for us. Anyway...we should be on the way moving forward now and I hope that people will forgive me for the interruptions to the service and will understand that sometimes human errors occur and we will always work to resolve the issues and continue forward with the ministry.

I think I will copy this post and make an announcement so that everyone knows what happened.

God bless.

Chris
 
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