Hi guys!
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Miss_Kagura, and I do a lot of the technical and coding at Dokuga. Our other administrators, Ladybattousai, Priestess Skye, and Wiccanmethuselah deal primarily with the actual hard work of administering the stories/forum/everything, and I handle the issues with the server and the site coding. I’m sending this email out to explain what’s happening with Dokuga right now so there’s not any confusion. I can understand the frustration, because I’m very frustrated too right now.
I’ve been in contact with our webhost, Lunarpages, and they’re having a major network issue that’s interfering with site traffic. Pretty much all the sites at our datacenter are experiencing connectivity issues, although they should be resolved quickly. Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do to on our end to resolve the issue. Whether or not you can access the site is largely dependent on where you live because the major network outage is preventing many of us from accessing the site.
In the past, Lunarpages has been very reliable and good with Dokuga and the support staff has worked with us. When our growth was out of control, they actually put us on a dedicated server for a month by ourselves for pretty much nothing so we could figure out where to go in terms of upgrading. They’ve helped us resolve technical issues, and they provide very prompt support. They are very well ranked and reviewed, and for most of the past two years, we’ve had very positive experiences with them. However, as some of you know, we’ve had three network outages in as many months and that’s not reliable service. The issue tonight is with the Add2Net network, which routes all the traffic going into the datacenter where our server is. A part of that seems to be down, but since that’s the parent company of our webhost, I still feel they’re responsible for the outage.
When you go to Dokuga, it’s kind of like taking a trip in a car. You go down all these different avenues until you get to Dokuga. This is basically like what would happen if you were driving and the main road was closed.
Please understand that we are aware of the issues and we’ll do whatever it takes to make sure the site remains up. We’ve recently made a number of changes behind the scenes to prevent exploitative usage from blocking users, we’ve minimized resource usage, and we use very little of the resources our server has—the cpu is rarely stressed more than 15% and we never push the server RAM past 40% or so. This isn’t an issue with server resources, so it’s not an issue where there are changes we can make on our end to ensure this doesn’t happen.
However, this isn’t the first time this has happened recently. We’ve had five outages that lasted longer than an hour over the past three months. Three were just like this, and two were denial-of-service (DOS) attacks. To contend with the DOS attacks, we made changes to block that, and we’ve had no more issues of that nature. Considering that we are paying for a dedicated server, I’m not happy with the increasing issues with the webhost. We’ve all invested a lot of time and work into Dokuga, and I don’t see the logic in paying for something that’s becoming more unreliable.
Once this issue tonight is resolved, I’m going to get in touch with the company by phone and discuss our concerns with the problems we’ve been having. As some of you may know, our paid webhosting expires in early March. Based on what they have to say, the site administrators (Wiccan, Ladybattousai, Priestess Skye) and myself will talk about where to go from here. The problems seem to come from the data center our dedicated server is in. Our VPS server was in NYC and we didn’t have any network issues, but the dedicated server is in southern California and that seems to be where the problem is. I do have one other site hosted with Lunarpages, and for the past eight months, it’s been up 100%--but it’s also not in the same center as the Dokuga server.
At the very least, I don’t think renewing our server for an entire year is a good choice. I’ll probably renew it either on a monthly basis or a quarterly basis so we’re not stuck with them for another year.
The fact is that we pay for a dedicated server. We should have ZERO downtime, and the site staff wants to make sure we have that. Frankly, we can have shoddy service for a lot less, and as long as we’re paying for premium service, anything less is ridiculous. If Lunarpages can’t provide us with no downtime, then it would probably be best if Dokuga found a new home.
What does that mean?
Moving from one company to another involves around twelve to twenty-four hours of having the site inaccessible. The domain named Dokuga.com would be redirected to the new server, and all files and databases would be moved. Believe it or not, Dokuga’s actually jumped servers about four times over the course of its life. Once when the site was first started, once when Lunarpages put us on a dedicated server for observation, then for our move to VPS, and then finally to our current server. It’s a fairly easy process on my end that involves moving server settings and backups over, and then changing the settings. So, don’t panic when you think about Dokuga moving—nothing about the site would change as far as the user end is concerned.
If it comes to that, we will obviously explain the process and allow input.
But yes, we are aware of the issues and we’re also frustrated by them. We WILL get the connectivity issues with Dokuga resolved, whether that means working with our current host or finding a new one. If you have any questions about any of this or have any input, please feel free to reply to this thread or contact me at
miss_kagura@feudalfairytale.com
Sincerely,
Miss Kagura
