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These boards run on a server that I personally configured, but the email notifications go through DreamHost's mail servers at the moment.
For whatever reason their mail servers stopped forwarding the notifications. I submitted a ticket them and hopefully they'll fix the problem soon. I'll update this post once they do.
(Eventually, this server will be responsible for sending the emails, and then we can breathe easy.)
Strangely enough, I was able to fix it from my end. The problem was quite odd because:
– It worked before (at least I was getting notifications on a non-okturtles email)
– DH's mail server was responding with an “OK” message, indicating it received the email.Twiddling with PHP's sendmail parameter fixed it though. 🙂
AnonymousI recommend moving away from Dreamhost as soon as is practical. Is your server running on a ZFS filesystem? Sometimes random problems can't be traceable to a single cause because of silent data corruption. With forum software that tends to be pretty active with reads and writes, and also has much persistent data in storage for indefinitely long periods of time, silent data corruption happens often enough to cause annoying problems eventually.
I recommend a 3-way RAIDZ mirror, so if one drive fails, you will still have 2 copies of good data so ZFS can correct any corrupted data found while the new replacement drive is being populated. ZFS corrects errors it finds by checking if an accurate copy exists on another drive. So, if you had only 2 drives, after one fails you would have no good copy of the data if an error is found on the surviving drive. You could use a parity config too, but I have so far avoided that because nothing we're doing requires other advantages it has, and I prefer being able to start from scratch with a single surviving drive, which you can't do if too many drives fail in a RAID5 config, even if some of the drives are working just fine.
On bigger sites where you need the performance advantages of striping data across drives, then I prefer to mirror them. I don't have anything that requires more sophistication than that, at least as far as the drives alone are concerned (servers, security, and caching are another story).
Yes, I agree about Dreamhost. I very much can't wait to move off of them, it's just that I'm going to need like an entire week to dedicate to that project.
I'm not using ZFS unfortunately… I am using LVM though, along with periodic tarsnap backups, and the VPS host (RamNode) does their own backups as well. They're also in charge of the drive configuration, so I'm not sure how much leeway I have there.
AnonymousBackups are useless without data integrity verifications. You'll eventually find out that the only reason you need a backup is because of a data integrity problem, but all of your backups have the same problem. In the year 2014, people still believe that computers don't make mistakes, only people do, just like in 1970. In reality, data corruption is an inevitable guarantee.
It's extremely difficult to troubleshoot a single flipped bit that brought down your site, and resulted in a cascade of corrupted disk reads and writes. You can't unscramble an egg, and entropy always wins when the shooting starts. So, to take Sun Tzu's advice, you're better off to avoid the battle in the first. Seriously, I wouldn't even bother with backups until you've got basic data integrity verifications and maintenance that ZFS mirrors give you. You're wasting your time and money on useless backups. It's just a lot of hand-waving.
We use a dedicated server now, but you can do just fine with a cheapo VPS, as long as it's got a ZFS mirror. I recommend going straight to FreeBSD 9.3 ZFS with 3 virtualized HDD's. CloudSigma can give you that. I don't do business with companies that give you blank stare when you ask about ZFS. They're backwards hill billies stuck in the 1970's that don't understand the basics of modern computing.
If you're not ready for FreeBSD (or you just prefer Linux), you can run a Linux VM on top of a FreeBSD or Solaris ZFS system. I seem to remember Entic.net was doing that, and nosupportlinuxhosting.com does that too, but they routinely lose data by wiping everything and starting fresh when they have a problem, with the explanation “what do you expect for $1 per month?”. If you want super easy ZFS on your own hardware, PCBSD does a good job of it, with a nice ZFS config GUI on install. For myself, we hire a FreeBSD/ZFS admin to handle stuff for us, I can focus my attention on other things. I doubt you want to spend the money on an admin at this stage.
I've had good experiences with all of the methods I mentioned above. Just be sure you're not running anything heavy on disk I/O or CPU, and you can make anything work, including the “cloud” solutions. They suffer badly under high loads.
This is a helpful list:
https://www.freebsd.org/commercial/isp.html
CloudSigma is on it, but Entic.net is not. Entic focuses on Solaris.
Tarsnap is awesome, with good attention to data integrity issues. rsync automatically verifies file transfers, and ZFS has its own methods for that too. We have found the ZFS methods to be both superior, and cheaper, so that's the only reason we don't use Tarsnap, if I remember correctly. Duplicati works with super cheap Amazon S3 hosting (the same that Tarsnap uses). I'm looking forward to Duplicati 2.0. Options for backups are so much easier and more flexible when you have data intergrity basics covered, in no small part because you're much less likely to need a backup when data corruption is no longer a problem. ZFS can “undo” a major hack too!
Oh, speaking of that, Incapsula does a good job of keeping hackers out of known vulnerabilities, but it's expensive.
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