God, 2 weeks have been a real problem for this site!
You may of noticed, I ‘ve had a lot of problems with this site, from Internal Server 500 errors (caused by running out of memory, not storage or bandwidth) to actually disappearing all together! I’ll explain.
I’m probably the oldest client on Cadence networks, this site is probably the oldest on their server and unfortunately, servers do have a limit to how long they can run before they give up. Thats the spoiler alert. So what happened?
Simple, it got old, but to get there, I had a number of problems.
Originally, I was trying to solve my Internal Server Error 500 as it was caused by this site getting a bit on the large side. It contains my previous WordPress account posts and media as well as modern stuff that shows off my abilities. Detailed in this post:
So, here I guess is part 2.
It worked for a week, very very well, I was keeping an eye on cPanel (which is the web hosting manager, basically controls my part of the site from a larger cluster with shared hosting) for the server information, made sure I wasn’t overloading it because – well it would be bad because if that happens, things break, unintentionally. Now I don’t know how many sites are on that server, but I guess there is a few and it is one server, known as whm0.
Now the last thing you want, is to knock not just your own site, but everyone else’s and you got to take some responsibility for that if it does, like I did. Set the PHP memory limit in WordPress to 128mb (I.e. allocate 128mb to this site for the sever side processing), checked, loaded up the site, checked, done. A week later… it broke – not just the site…
Oh no! Everything, the 3 sites I know of:
www.burgess.world (my dads site)
https://www.southdownsas.org.uk
And every other site now was suddenly offline. To make matters worse, cPanel also allows you to have a mailbox connected to your domain. Its not bad, its not the best and it doesn’t live up to what Zimbra can do, it works, it does the job. I still think Outlook is the best though. Now if you have my world email address, which is tied to the domain, you then realise that this email account is tied to the same inbox that is on the site, which means, no site = no emails = bliss – or stress!
So, an email later, site back online. It lasts just over 2 days and cuts out, again! Gets reset after a support email, cuts out 2 days later and then gradually gets shorter and shorter, until it cuts out on a weekend and offline for 2 days which was 10-12th August 2025.
In the meantime, I try everything to reduce the load, thinking that I was the problem, poured over the logs, got my dad to do the same, nothing out of the ordinary, but cPanel was moaning that the storage devices (not hot how they work, but still) was reporting errors. It was the “/” storage area to begin with as cPanel runs Linux, so drives look different in Linux. “/” is basically the root directory.
So, I did more and more diagnostics with the same outcome, now I am having nightmares and what was making matters worse is that Jetpack was adding to it. Random notifications at 05:35 for a start saying my site is offline.. ARRGHHH! It started giving me nightmares. So I went more and more nuclear, until I thought “lets do one last ditch effort, back everything up and delete everything, how long will it last?”
The nuclear option then proved something.
A day later, the server shut down again, but I didn’t report it, I had then discovered that we are not looking at a software fault, but now, a hardware fault. Then the next problem, “/mnt/backup” was showing errors! Yeah, the server was dying a slow and painful death. It got replaced this morning for something better. Plus they had issues with it for some time.
So, to qtp, thank you for your services, sadly though, its time to put you to bed. Good night.
In the meantime, they’ve upgraded me to a server with 2 extra cores, so it should be slightly quicker. However, I just can’t believe everything happened coincidently at the same time as I was sorting another issue out. I guess that is the irony of life. Hopefully, I’ll rest easier tonight – oh, I got to setup Jetpack on my tablet again, the Samsung Tablet anyway. I got a review coming up, involving it, but not as the main star. I went out shopping on payday for a new tablet, the cheapest one I could find on AliExpress without being too cheap. I couldn’t find any indepth reviews, so its time to put my thoughts on it. The reason is also slightly more interesting as I have a draft post and I plan to talk about it more in the future – I also need to update my CV with the new task.
No, I’ve not left my job, I’m still working.
Go here: https://www.fishbourne-pc.gov.uk/the-parish-council/councillors/
See if you can spot me (hint, its easy if you look a the hair colour).
Yes, I’ve gone down the political route, actually, I’m Apolitical, in that I don’t support a political party of any shape or form – but representing my views at a local parish council about local issues. I’ve been “co-opted” for about a month, in that I am elected by the councillors and not the members of the public and I got elected in by a large majority that really shocked me.
I’ll be talking about that in time to come and what difference I have made as I plan to do something for the better. I should point out, being a councillor, I can’t act on my own, but I can act as a body for decisions, although there is things I will be bringing up and I have a notepad for that, this is also where the tablet comes in as I have a council email address and as my inbox is subject to FOIA and SAR which is similar to my current employer – I don’t want my personal data mixed in with public data and vice versa as for a start, you got a number of laws to consider, that being the Data Protection Act 1998/General Data Regulation Act 2016 (which pretty much replaces the DPA 1998, even though I find out we call it DPA 2018) as well as Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) and Local Government Act 2000 or there abouts – I’m not 100% on this, but you get the idea where I am coming from. Considering FOIA needs to have a pretty good excuse for not having something, but at the same time, you have to adhere to GDPR/DPA which can be a fight between what’s right and wrong. You can’t just say “you don’t have it”, “why don’t you have it?”.
Hence my desire to review it and why I brought it. If you are wondering, I got a PriTom L8 tablet. 8 inch, £50 with savings, well was a little cheaper than that and so far, for the purpose I brought it for, its Ok. I’ll explain more and my concerns with it hopefully in the future. Lets say, it was a surprise in both ways. Particulary when I pitted it in an aquarium WebGL test with my Samsung Galaxy Tab A9 8.7.
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