The GWE Forum was down! What Happened?!
Welcome back, growers!
As many of you may already know, the GrowWeedEasy.com forum was down for 3 weeks! It happened out of nowhere and none of our users were given any warning...so what happened?
The Short Answer:
Poorly designed forum software + not-so-savvy forum owners + LOTS of pictures = overloaded (dead) forum. We worked with multiple programmers every single day until we got this ol' beast running again and boy was the process painful!
The Long Answer:
Nebula and I aren't programmers. In fact, we can barely keep an old-fashioned site from not exploding into internet flames. So, when the time came for us to open a forum, we went with one of the most popular and widely-used forum software packages available (which I won't name here). This forum software has a very large user base and we figured it could handle the amount of traffic we could throw at it so we purchased some server space and installed the software (last year) without much hassle. There were a ton of bugs (especially relating to picture uploads), but at least the forum worked for the most part. Little did we know a storm was brewing...
The forum software we picked has a weird quirk that we didn't anticipate: by default, all uploaded pictures are saved as rows in the forums database, not in the file system! While that might not be a problem for forums that are mostly text based, our forum is ALL ABOUT pictures, and boy did that create a problem! While we were all uploading pics and conversing, the database was rapidly growing to out of control due to a large number of pictures being uploaded. Since we used the default settings for the forum, we thought everything was fine and had no idea anything was wrong until...
Fast-forward to the morning of 9/11 at and we get an email from our website host informing us that they are terminating our service due to a too-large database. We lost access to everything, and they said they would delete ALL of our info in 7 days regardless of what we did. At the time, our hosting account had a database size limit of 1GB. When they turned off the forum, the database was 78GB! Our host wasn't helping solve the problem and wouldn't let us access the database, so we were left with the task of finding a professional since losing all that forum data wasn't an option.
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Long story short, it took a lot of heartache and stressful, stressful days/nights, but the forum looks to be working again and we're happy to have it back. We're going to keep in contact with the pros to make sure this doesn't happen again and we're already on a more powerful server in addition to being HTTPS now (GWE is soon to follow). We still consider the forum to be in 'testing mode' since we can't anticipate all the problems that would arise from fixing such a massive database, but the forum is on a path for a more stable future now that we have help and we consider this incident to be our first and last forum disaster. *Runs to knock on wood*
I know it was stressful and disheartening for those of you who frequent this forum, and I'm sure that it was also infuriating for new growers who no longer had a welcoming place to discuss cultivating cannabis. Just know that from the moment we found out the forum was down, there was no other option in our minds besides "Fix it!". I hope this issue hasn't killed your faith in our ability to give you a reliable community. If anything, know that we'll try harder than anyone else because it's something we truly believe in.
Thanks everyone and happy growing!
~Sirius & Nebula
As many of you may already know, the GrowWeedEasy.com forum was down for 3 weeks! It happened out of nowhere and none of our users were given any warning...so what happened?
The Short Answer:
Poorly designed forum software + not-so-savvy forum owners + LOTS of pictures = overloaded (dead) forum. We worked with multiple programmers every single day until we got this ol' beast running again and boy was the process painful!
The Long Answer:
Nebula and I aren't programmers. In fact, we can barely keep an old-fashioned site from not exploding into internet flames. So, when the time came for us to open a forum, we went with one of the most popular and widely-used forum software packages available (which I won't name here). This forum software has a very large user base and we figured it could handle the amount of traffic we could throw at it so we purchased some server space and installed the software (last year) without much hassle. There were a ton of bugs (especially relating to picture uploads), but at least the forum worked for the most part. Little did we know a storm was brewing...
The forum software we picked has a weird quirk that we didn't anticipate: by default, all uploaded pictures are saved as rows in the forums database, not in the file system! While that might not be a problem for forums that are mostly text based, our forum is ALL ABOUT pictures, and boy did that create a problem! While we were all uploading pics and conversing, the database was rapidly growing to out of control due to a large number of pictures being uploaded. Since we used the default settings for the forum, we thought everything was fine and had no idea anything was wrong until...
Fast-forward to the morning of 9/11 at and we get an email from our website host informing us that they are terminating our service due to a too-large database. We lost access to everything, and they said they would delete ALL of our info in 7 days regardless of what we did. At the time, our hosting account had a database size limit of 1GB. When they turned off the forum, the database was 78GB! Our host wasn't helping solve the problem and wouldn't let us access the database, so we were left with the task of finding a professional since losing all that forum data wasn't an option.
-----
Long story short, it took a lot of heartache and stressful, stressful days/nights, but the forum looks to be working again and we're happy to have it back. We're going to keep in contact with the pros to make sure this doesn't happen again and we're already on a more powerful server in addition to being HTTPS now (GWE is soon to follow). We still consider the forum to be in 'testing mode' since we can't anticipate all the problems that would arise from fixing such a massive database, but the forum is on a path for a more stable future now that we have help and we consider this incident to be our first and last forum disaster. *Runs to knock on wood*
I know it was stressful and disheartening for those of you who frequent this forum, and I'm sure that it was also infuriating for new growers who no longer had a welcoming place to discuss cultivating cannabis. Just know that from the moment we found out the forum was down, there was no other option in our minds besides "Fix it!". I hope this issue hasn't killed your faith in our ability to give you a reliable community. If anything, know that we'll try harder than anyone else because it's something we truly believe in.
Thanks everyone and happy growing!
~Sirius & Nebula
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