Thanks to everyone who's giving feedback ... at least it's letting me know what's NOT working.
Our .htaccess went up yesterday and includes a very long list of known bad bots (taken from javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess13.shtml ), plus this afternoon I also blocked all of Russia and China (I'm getting kind of peeved, can you tell?).
That didn't seem to make much difference immediately, so at our host's suggestion I set up a new user in their system to put JUST the forums under. They say "The resources of the server are shared with the websites running under a particular user, so by creating a new user and moving a domain to that new user gives it more resources to work with, instead of sharing it with multiple web sites."
It is better. It's still throwing up errors occasionally, but the site is more usable, and I have a better than 50% chance of posting something without having to hit F5 multiple times. Sometimes it's very sluggish, but does eventually post/display a page.
If you want to check your log files for around (just after) 7 am Eastern Time, you might be able to identify some more issues. At that time I wasn't able to access for about 10 minutes, so something was happening then, and if your log files show you which sites were trying to access, or what was going on around that time, it might be very helpful.
Generally having poor performance today, since this morning (~7am). Trying to browse on my phone, with full signal strength, no problems anywhere else. Getting to post took 3 tries. Posting Tries are N-1.
Hard to say since this is the first time since i last posted in this thread that i have been able to access the forum at all. (which of course doesn´t say that much since i´m not constantly trying)
Our host has informed us that the two bots most heavily hitting the forums are Google and MSN. I've changed our robot.txt file this morning to make them wait 1 hr now between requests, instead of 10 sec. Let me know if that improves things.
Today was a good day. I was on from about 9.30 am central time until now, and I think the first 503 error I got was at 8:56 pm, followed by the Service Temporarily Unavailable message a few minutes later, and a 503 just a few minutes ago.
I've had about half a dozen 503 errors this morning.
It is better, but these 503 errors only started, and started suddenly on May 13th. Things have been progressively improving since that time, although until the 20th, the site was essentially unusable, or so unpredictable as to make using it a royal pain. Since the 20th and the steps listed to improve access have helped, it's nothing like it was prior to May 13th.
Something different this morning. Instead of 503 errors, I'm getting errors (in Chrome it's the Oops error, in an unconfigured IE it goes to bing) that I can't reach the site at all.
It's happened about times, but a reload seems to bring everything back up just fine, almost immediately.
Sorry. Up until this morning things had been going great with nary a 503 error in sight.
And I left out the number above. It was 5. Although it is better now.
