Sorry for the downtime

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Apologies to everyone for the server outage that has forced F1 Fanatic offline for the past four days.

The problem seems to have been caused by the large amounts of traffic visiting the site, which have continued to rise even during the off-season. I am of course very happy that so many people are coming to F1 Fanatic, but I?óÔé¼Ôäóm not an expert on running web servers and I failed to anticipate the strain this would put on my system.

F1 Fanatic is now running on a new and faster server, and hopefully that will solve the problem. If you are experiencing difficult visiting the site please contact me either via the contact form, on Twitter or via the F1 Fanatic Facebook Group.

Thanks very much for all the offers of help, assistance and hosting alternatives that came in from many of you. I would like to keep in touch with everyone who offered advice and ideas so I can learn from them and avoid a repeat of this gigantic inconvenience.

Once again, I?óÔé¼Ôäóm very sorry for the downtime and I?óÔé¼Ôäóll do my best to make sure it doesn?óÔé¼Ôäót happen again.

Now, back to F1?óÔé¼?ª

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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    • 57 comments on “Sorry for the downtime”

    1. todd
      16th February 2009, 7:49

      mmm still getting the odd internal 500 error…

    2. Profile Photo

      Keith Collantine (@keithcollantine)
      16th February 2009, 7:57

      I know, I’ve just discovered that as well.

      To be honest, I’m absolutely gutted. I have no idea why it is still doing this. I’ll be in touch with everyone who’s offered help to get some help, but I was very confident that the upgrade was going to fix the problem.

      Sorry everyone.

      1. scunnyman
        16th February 2009, 18:33

        Great to have you back Keith. Really missed all the news and comments . I thought we was never gonna get you back. But these things do happen.

      2. scunnyman
        16th February 2009, 18:34

        i’m not geting the 500 internal error yet!!!!! fingers crossed

    3. Profile Photo

      Keith Collantine (@keithcollantine)
      16th February 2009, 8:04

      An earlier description of the problem is here for anyone who might be able to offer some assistance.

    4. Somers
      16th February 2009, 8:33

      A hole in my life has just filled up, great to have you back Keith!

    5. Noel
      16th February 2009, 8:43

      I wondered what’d happened – I was blaming my mobile internet :)

      Good to have you back.

    6. Mark S
      16th February 2009, 8:50

      Good to have you back. This is an excellent site and I appreciate all the work you put into it. Thanks.

    7. Adrian
      16th February 2009, 8:51

      The lingering error messages could possibly be down to the various DNS servers and cache servers not having fully refreshed yet, I’d give it a day or so before spending to much effort trying to track them down…

      Anyway, good to have you back online…

      1. Profile Photo

        Keith Collantine (@keithcollantine)
        16th February 2009, 14:17

        Are you getting 500s as well Adrian?

    8. DG
      16th February 2009, 8:52

      Just shows how popular a blog you have Keith, keep up the good work!

    9. milos
      16th February 2009, 8:59

      well, I am not sure what your problem may be, but I started to experience database troubles from the moment I upgraded to WordPress 2.7. Nothing seemed to be wrong but the errors kept coming up, especially while I was working in the admin area. It all seems to have fixed itself after upgrade to WordPress 2.7.1

    10. Lustigson
      16th February 2009, 9:27

      Good to see the site up and running, again. Keep up the good work, Keith! :)

    11. mail123456
      16th February 2009, 9:34

      ps ax show that you are running php as fast-cgi or cgi and there is nothing interesting

      second log shows no much … just missing content type … may be you have some wring redirect to file which apache don’t know what to do, but this itself can’t be reason for crash …

      could you make changes to your php.ini and specify
      error_log = some_file
      then check file for reason why php died if 500 is from php …

      next log is just a notice

    12. Loki
      16th February 2009, 9:50

      It’s amazing how productive I’ve been without this site up…better not happen again! :D

    13. cyanide
      16th February 2009, 9:54

      If you have a dedicated server, switch to lighttpd, and reduce the number of db queries the blog software makes. Should reduce the load by a lot.

    14. D Winn
      16th February 2009, 10:03

      Welcome back Keith

    15. Chalky
      16th February 2009, 10:08

      Nice to see you back up and running.

      Considering Keith provides such a quality blog for free, can I remind us to click on one of the adverts to help out. I try to do this now and then.
      Not sure how much revenue Keith gets from it though.

    16. alan
      16th February 2009, 10:18

      I am glad too see? – that youre back again Keith – even though I havent been adding to many comments it’s developed into a daily catchup with whats happening in this at times maddening F1 world – thanks for youre hard work

    17. Damon
      16th February 2009, 10:23

      “the server outage that has forced F1 Fanatic offline for the past four days.”

      Only four days?!?
      God, it seemed like it was two weeks or sth.

      1. Profile Photo

        Keith Collantine (@keithcollantine)
        16th February 2009, 14:18

        Tell me about it. I’ve not been fun to live with recently…

    18. The_Pope
      16th February 2009, 10:25

      Keith,

      I ran this past my guru (briefly), and his response was “Looks like a server config issue. The mime setup is probably wrong on the server if mod_mime is barfing”… hope that helps (doesn’t mean anything to me!)

    19. sajonaraman
      16th February 2009, 11:16

      At last- alive and kickin’ is exactly how we want your blog to be Keith.

    20. bob1716
      16th February 2009, 11:22

      Glad to see you up and running again Keith. Keep up the good work and more power.

    21. Colin
      16th February 2009, 11:25

      Glad its back, great site!

    22. Chaz
      16th February 2009, 11:32

      Just glad you are back. I’ve been having withdrawal symptoms lol and they are not pretty, believe me…

    23. Sush Meerkat
      16th February 2009, 12:30

      While sorry to hear about the downtime, its great that your getting more and more traffic, keep up the good work.

    24. D Winn
      16th February 2009, 12:43

      Keith,
      I think your recent site SUSPENSION maybe had you KERSing, at why your SLICK site CRASHED your FORMULA to be on TRACK for 2009 RACES.

      So as you WING your way TYRElessly to find what is BRAKING the BUTTONs, I’ll spend some time at SIDEPODcast, as a DIFFUSER, and hope you don’t EXHAUST yourself picking over the (WISH)BONES of the site.

      May the MAXimum DOWNFORCE be with you.

      1. Profile Photo

        Keith Collantine (@keithcollantine)
        16th February 2009, 14:18

        argh…

    25. Nick
      16th February 2009, 13:12

      wb, felt like forever.

    26. Manuel F
      16th February 2009, 14:13

      Welcome back! Don’t worry Keuth, we know you always do your best for this site, and so many people appreciate it.
      Greetings from Italy

    27. Profile Photo

      Keith Collantine (@keithcollantine)
      16th February 2009, 14:19

      Thanks guys!

      Can I ask, are people still getting errors at the moment? If so, please leave details.

      1. Adrian
        16th February 2009, 15:37

        I do keep getting the temporary holding page when I first try and come to the site, but a Ctrl+F5 refresh clears it.

      2. diseased rat
        16th February 2009, 16:07

        Good to have you back Keith, and for what it’s worth I haven’t had a single error since your return.

    28. Pete Walker
      16th February 2009, 14:30

      Great to have the site back online! :D

    29. Striay/iceman
      16th February 2009, 16:34

      Phew THANKGOODNESS your back!!

      I was beginning to get depressed without you people to talk about F1 with!!

      i went to the Jerez tests on thursday! i can tell you im no hamilton fan but he was the only one that looked like he knew what he was doing (not to add vettel and webber they were also quiet good) Renaults car looks very slow to me with alonso on board at least! anyways i have some photos if you want them Keith though they arent very good!

    30. Adam Milleneuve
      16th February 2009, 16:35

      Great to have F1F back online, no more 500 errors for me so far…

      Would it not be possible to have the same site running on a mirror to avoid any future issues from causing the whole site to be down – a fallback if you like!?

      1. Profile Photo

        Keith Collantine (@keithcollantine)
        16th February 2009, 18:43

        I’ll be looking into this among other solutions, although it isn’t cheap 8-)

      2. patrickl
        16th February 2009, 20:22

        I have two web co-located servers in the Netherlands. If you’d like you could put your site on that as backup. If the architecture is something you could use of course (FreeBSD)

    31. EGC
      16th February 2009, 17:24

      Here still errors:
      Due to server problems, F1 Fanatic is temporarily unavailable

      We’re working on fixing the site at the moment.

      Please note the following services are still available:

      F1 Fanatic Forum (read more about the downtime here)

      Maximum Motorsport

      And you can stay in touch using:

      Twitter

      Facebook

      Drop.io

      Sorry for the inconvenience, we will have the site back again as soon as possible

      Good luck, we miss you!!!!

    32. EGC
      16th February 2009, 17:26

      Upsss… working on firefox but not on IE 6….
      Strange .-)

    33. Jay
      16th February 2009, 17:46

      Welcome back Keith

    34. Profile Photo

      Keith Collantine (@keithcollantine)
      16th February 2009, 18:43

      Those of you who are still seeing the ‘F1 Fanatic is closed’ page can remedy that by hitting Ctrl-F5. That page has been deleted, your browsers just have the old version cached still.

      I’m aware of thee IE6 glitch, that’s an unrelated CSS problem which I’m going to take a look at shortly.

      Is anyone still getting Error 500s?

    35. verasaki
      16th February 2009, 19:43

      using ie, no errors. welcome back.

    36. EGC
      16th February 2009, 21:05

      Working perfectly now on IE 6 :-)
      welcome home again!!!!
      Thanks Keith.
      My favourite spanish blog was having the same problem since yesterday, what a mess…
      Now eerybody ok again, buff….
      :-) Cheers.

    37. manatcna
      16th February 2009, 21:10

      Just want to add my WB Keith.

      Your site was sorely missed.

      Firefox user – no problems :)

    38. Gman
      17th February 2009, 0:35

      Great to see everything up and running again- I did indeed miss everything for the time that you were down.

      I was still getting the error messages on my home PC, but the control + F5 cleared it easily. Good luck with the catching up :)

    39. scunnyman
      17th February 2009, 1:11

      using IE8 and no errors at all keith

    40. Chris Reynolds
      17th February 2009, 2:03

      Keith, Firefox user here also- no problems today. Whew..I thought it was computer, it is two years old and we know how outdated PC’s become and fast! Haven’t had any problems today. A few pictures took considerable time to load but that could be my bandwidth…
      F1 on……….

    41. Jay
      17th February 2009, 4:40

      I was having the same problem as EGC. The Ctrl+F5 fixed it. Man, I was getting pretty antsy with no F1F! All the other sires dont have the personal feeling that F1F is all about.

      Great work Keith!

      Did you hear that USF1 is considering signing Danica Patrick? I did some research on some active female racers, some of them are going pretty well. Fancy doing a post about it?

      1. Profile Photo

        Keith Collantine (@keithcollantine)
        17th February 2009, 8:41

        Thanks Jay – yes I did see that, am thinking of doing an article on it, but I’ve still got a lot of work to do on site administration at the moment to ensure it runs properly.

    42. Oliver
      17th February 2009, 7:43

      Welcome back.

    43. carl
      17th February 2009, 14:43

      When iconnect to http://www.f1fanatic.co.uk I get to a maintanance page? Has the address changed?

    44. Jamey
      17th February 2009, 18:04

      GREAT TO HAVE YOU BACK UP AND RUNNING!

    45. Babur
      17th February 2009, 19:32

      Looks good. No errors on my part. Will let you know if I come across anything.

    46. Babur
      17th February 2009, 19:33

      @Carl, just clear out your cache. Most probably you are using or trying to access the cached version.

    47. K.R
      18th February 2009, 13:23

      welcome back :)

      I assume that you are on a shared hosting on 1and1 ? if you remember during the Live chat I told you that 1and1 has many bad reviews :( . very slow and they host like 2000 accounts on a single server.

      Anyway My advice is go for a managed VPS ( $35/month) – you won’t have any problems in the future :).

      @carl : Try to clear your cache .

    Comments are closed.