site down help

[skolar]

I'm rather new to web site administration so i would greatly appreciate some help.

My site has been going down quite frequently and i cannot figure out why. I'm on a shared server at OLM.net and the site goes down once a day or once every 2-3 days which is quite unacceptable. We are still small and we dont get a lot of traffic. We want to have decent reliability before we start heavily marketing and getting more traffic, however i cant seem to figure out how to get to reliability.

I'm open to any suggestions at this point. If its my host, i'm willing to switch if you can suggest a better one. I also understand that it might be because of the shared server, but i want to know for sure that it is before going dedicated, is it my scripts' fault or the server?

Any advice with this would again be greatly appreciated.

[Greg]

Well, if we had the site name, we could check it out for ya a few times and develop a reasoning for the problem. Host, site design, or possibly DNS issues.

Post a link.

[skolar]

that would be great...the site is: www.karmaone.org

[Zero Tolerance]

without putting too much thought on it...my first guess would be that your "shared" host is getting a flood in the mySQL. That is something that isnt rare on a virtual hosting package...especially since alot of people are using php to manipulate databases.

What is the fix?....well the best one would be buy a dedicated server....however most of us cant justify the expense. So then there is always the option of buying a biz class inet package and hosting the site on a dedicated server that YOU own. That is the route I would take if price is a factor!

[skolar]

Going to a dedicated server is definitely something we need to do since this is a business. However, i've read a bunch of web hosting reviews and i cant figure out which hosting service will provide the reliability i need. Also, my site admin skills are very beginner and i dont want to cause detrimental problems with the inevitable learning curve.

Any suggestions on a host and/or newbies to domain administration (apache, mysql, etc.)

[Zero Tolerance]

I dont know who to refer you to. I would Google a "top 10 hosting providers" and do some research.

Since you dont know much about "apache, mySQL, etc" then maybe running your own server isnt such a great idea.

I would think that reputation goes a long way in dealing with a host. You want to make sure you are getting exactly what you pay for. So back to my first comment...researching the top 10 providers would be the best way to do that. Preferrably you could find someone that actually did some undercover work in their research. Per say....bought a package for x number of months and reported on their experience with uptime, customer service, etc.....

Thats how I would do it if in your shoes.

PS...another benefit of buying a dedicated server is you let someone else do all of the legwork of setting up the server and making sure it is running properly....but make sure whoever you go with does backups routinely. You should always back up your site yourself...but you never know if you have an actual good backup until you go to use it. With Unix, and alot of backup software for windows servers....your backup data gets compared with original data....to eliminate errors.