Hi All,
Apologies for the unexpected downtime. It was very unfortunate for us as we started this Years fundraising drive a few days beforehand.
It might be helpful for forum members to understand why it happened and what is done to prevent it in the future.
Our current hosting provider has decided to pull the plug on the website without as much as a warning as possibly some of the features we provide consume too many resources. Naturally, this is something you should prepare for when used a shared hosting as there are ways to reduce the resource usage. However was unexpected due to the inexperience of our IT staff (with current setup) as well as our then hosting provider being a legacy from days when the website was running on expression engine. The reason why it took long to recover the site was that initially, we tried to work with the hosting to upgrade the WordPress setup to hosting that would be “optimized for WordPress.” It was only during later stages of the setup that we found out that the package they provide would require additional migration work, which while was complementary would take another 72+ hours. This solution would also lock us into their proprietary solution and would not prevent downtime as it would run on a similar shared hosting and could be disabled if it exceeds a resource quota. As such a different solution was chosen – a Virtual Private Server. It took a bit of extra time to get approval for this solution, and it was set up in a matter of hours. There is still work to be done, but at least for now we have secured our chunk of resources.
As such the following improvements have been implemented:
A virtual private server which will likely prevent downtime in case of WP being a resource hog.
Further improvements are anticipated:
We will set up a Content Delivery Network for WP to ensure faster loading times
SSL will be set up to improve security
As part of the organizational plan development, new positions will be created for website support and we will try to optimize organizational structure to make sure decisions are made quickly in case of necessity
You are welcome to use the following referral link to help reduce our hosting costs and to support our new VPS hosting provider:
https://chunkhost.com/r/47438
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