My hats of to the moderators and so forth, but when the forum had so much trouble a while back, I know I got frustrating. Now it is back and running really well. [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/worship.gif[/img]

But it seems to me that we don't have near the traffic we used to have here or is it just me?

This is probably the best info sharing forum out there. Folks here post there install pics and are honest with the mods that work and don't.

I hope we can get back as strong as we had before. [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/thumb.gif[/img]

 

same thoughts here

 

It was down again last night. I'd say we are still not out of the waters. People are creatures of habit and when they start frequenting another forum because this one is unavailable, you end up having some of those folks not coming back.

I'll still hope that the action heats up again here.

 

Spring time is here and so is the nice weather. The posts tend to slow down during the warm weather months when we can all be out taking an evening cruise after work. [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/thumb.gif[/img]

 

The number of postings are down because there is absolutely nothing new to read. Same old stuff rehashed over and over again.

 

I agree, definitely not the traffic of the past.

 

66 is right. When the S197 was new, there was so much to say about it. Then when aftermarket items started showing up, it was a feeding frenzy of information. Very little new is out there right now. We're still talking, but there's not much new to say. I don't think any other Mustang forum could lure many away for long. This is still the best. We just need new news! [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/dunno.gif[/img]

 

I personally havent been posting as much as I used to.

 

That and with all the subforums the posts get scattered all over.

 

As someone has previously stated, the "frenzy" when the 05 was due to come out thru the rollout and mod state would be impossible to maintain. IMO there is not alot happening. I find myself checking out the Shelby,, etc but the facts are I am never going to be able to afford one, or the Parnelli Jones, etc. My mods are like 95% done and unless a Mach I. Bullit or Boss comes out that has some legit performance enhancements (versus appearance) within the next couple of years -- will keep the 05 and go the SC route

That being said, you can't beat this site for info, advice, and folks willling to give you some help.

 

I agree with the post already here as to why traffic has dropped off, and the main cause is because of nothing new and exciting. We've all seen hundreds of photos of the GT500, so its not "new" anymore to us. I think traffic will pick up once they start hitting the lots, same with the GT/CS.

 

I noticed after the site went down and came back up the membership went up to over 12,000. Also went to look up a question on another site and the BS was not worth reading to get to the answer. So I asked the question here and was given real answers. Thank you TMS!

 

I know a lot has been done already, ie new technology for the 05, but there are a lot of new owners who can benefit from those of us who have modded the car and can tell them what works. As for me, most of my mods are done, a few left. I am still interested in new products for our cars.

 

Its also hard to post when the site is backed up every other day. I know there are growing pains but it's almost comical how often you can't get on now,so I think people are getting frustrated and quit trying.

 

Well this site has been down more than a $2.00 hooker in the last few weeks so I like many others have been trolling other Mustang sites. I like this one the best but I got to get my Mustang fix somewhere. [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/rolleyes.gif[/img]

 

While I do try to remain positive, and this is one of 3 sites I check every day, I can tell you that site availability has definitely had a negative impact on posts. I know this because on all three of those sites, there has been a thread with the name "TMS down again?" subject line.

Being in the IT field for 12 years now, I can appreciate the challenge of IT infrastructure growing pains and a ****-poor hosting company. I'm sure TMS is all over this, but I would be a bit worried at this point. I'm not trying to start an argument, but I am curious what TMS thinks of all of this, and what the plan is going forward.

That and with all the data loss, it is difficult for newb's to use the search function to find write ups.

I assume at this point, all the posts we lost are not coming back? Correct?

This is the best mustang site on the web hands down! I just don't want to see it start to fizzle out. When I have a hard core technical question, this is where I come to get answers.

 

I promise to post at least one worthless response a day.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(rygenstormlocke @ May 1, 2006, 2:53 PM) Quoted post</div><div class='quotemain'>
Being in the IT field for 12 years now, I can appreciate the challenge of IT infrastructure growing pains and a ****-poor hosting company. I'm sure TMS is all over this, but I would be a bit worried at this point. I'm not trying to start an argument, but I am curious what TMS thinks of all of this, and what the plan is going forward.[/b][/quote]

While I'm not really sure where the "****-poor" comment applies, I'll try to address your questions since I am part of the "hosting company" for TMS. To begin with, I want you to keep in mind that Brad does this on an individual level, not as a corporate conglomerate that normally backs a site of this size.

We, WebHostDigital.com, strive to provide the best solutions possible for Brad and TMS without absolutely breaking the bank. Sure, we could sale him a nice redundant web cluster with all the frills, but that would quickly force the TMS business model in a direction that neither WebHostDigital nor Brad wants (pop-up ad's anyone?). With that said, we play a delicate balancing game of hardware versus traffic based on our best "guesstimations" as to how people will react to new models and features. The biggest downtime issues (that are not related to regular maintenance and upgrades) always happened after a major release of said models (S197) and new media/features. It's difficult to effectively plan for quadrupled traffic in a six hour span and be cost conscious. The last string of issues started with a traffic overload (RSS Feeds) and just by bad luck ended in a RAID controller failure (the data loss). If you look at the overall picture from the beginnings, TMS and its Forums have doubled every nine months in traffic and in size which has been a learning experience for both Brad and I. Nobody, in their sane mind, ever thought this site could/would experience such explosive growth. We liken it to riding a bottle rocket with the stick broke off, you're going to go somewhere fast, you just don't know where!

To cut it short, we are very aware of the frustrations that TMS users go through. All of us at WebHostDigital and TMS have a personal stake* in the success and continuity of this community because as you've said it's one of the best places on the internet for all things Mustang (and maybe even Ford). Recognizing this "need" we have made a couple of decisions that will ensure better reliability and increased load capabilities. One is the decision to change software to vBulletin. We feel vB is better suited to handle the size and complexity of TMS and have been in close contact with vB's technical services that assures us of this fact. Invision has served us well, but we've found its limitation. Another more notable change is the move to faster hardware in terms of an Enterprise-grade web server. The last one failed in a most undesirable fashion (the data loss) which has prompted us to change hardware providers post haste for not only TMS, but our entire customer base. As you are probably well aware your average purpose built web server is not designed to act like a database backend, but we are now elevating the hardware of this site into the Enterprise level which brings all of that architecture into play. The only unknown factor in this equation is the human aspect. It will still present a hurdle in trying to predict what traffic will be like in X amount of time. Normally, TMS receives a hardware upgrade and does fine with load levels for 5-9 months, now we are going to set a lower acceptable traffics limit and try to avoid load based outages by being proactive instead of reactive to demand.

All of us understand and greatly appreciate everyone's patience in this time of growth. I applaud Brad for the hard work he has done in bringing credible and accurate information to the web (we all know how valuable that can be). I also bow to the Forums Staff for providing a safe haven of information and family enjoyable environment to be a part of. As long as the users of TMS have a need, we will continue striving to fill it. We may be a little banged up now, but don't count us out of the fight yet. I hope I have answered your (and others) questions/concerns fully. If there are anymore, I can address them as needed.

Here's to a bigger and better TMS. [img]style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/beer.gif[/img]

-Nathan

* from above: I, along with Nic, are long time Mustang owners. We've actually all come from the same car crowd (except for Nic) and keep in contact on a personal level. Brad and Scott have strict instructions to contact us, no matter when it is, in the event of problems with TMS.

 

I can appreciate all that you said, and really appreciate you taking the time to put up this post for us. It makes me feel better knowing that appropriate attention to detail is being applied to these issues.

I’m also aware that Brad does this on an individual level and can appreciate that as well.

Finally, I would like to get to my “****-poor” hosting comment as it seems I might have hit a nerve. For that I do apologize and I usually try to be more tactful with my comments on the boards. But, I will give you some reasoning behind my comment, and simply put, it comes down to one thing:

• Tape Backups

I understand the weight of responsibility you have, as I used to run data centers that ran web sites hosting millions of simultaneous web users at any given moment in time, combine that times 100’s of web sites in one facility and you have a massive responsibility on your shoulders. We too had our share of growing pains and that was back in the mid to late 90’s during the dot.bomb days. And I can tell you what was the easiest way to lose a contract/revenue, and that was simply, not having tape backups. Even our lowest service offerings included tape backups, and on the few occasions we failed to complete them, crediting the customer wasn’t enough, we ended up loosing the customer. I can understand the frustrations and “perfect storm” required to have a raid controller failure, been there myself when the Coldwellbanker.com was my responsibility, but I’m not talking controller failure. I am talking failure to produce tape backups. The farthest back I can go is around February of this year.

So, I am going to agree on all of your points. But I won’t budge on tape back ups, we didn’t just lose a few weeks of data; we lost technical write ups and threads we refer newbs to from last year and beyond. So this is my one gripe, and what fuelled my “****-poor” comment. I am apologizing for my choice of words, but I will not back down on the whole backup thing. Unless it was Brads decision and ties into operational costs, in that case, I can understand how my meagre membership dues do not cover it. Also, I asked if any additional data will be restored. Is it safe to assume that what we see is what we get, and our old threads are gone?

This is TMS, and I think it is the best mustang site on the web, thus we will rebuild it, rewrite our threads and what not. Heck, I’m still a newb myself. Of course, maybe I am doing something wrong when I search legacy threads or try to go back farther than February of this year, in that case I am more than willing to accept I am wrong and just tell me what it is I am doing wrong with the site.

So, in closing I will say this. There are a ton of IT mustang owners here and I’m sure it gets annoying to hear their professional opinions and what not to you via PM and Emails. You have a massive job, and based on your response, it sounds like you know how to do it well.

Regards,

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(rygenstormlocke @ May 5, 2006, 4:44 PM) Quoted post</div><div class='quotemain'>
I can appreciate all that you said, and really appreciate you taking the time to put up this post for us. It makes me feel better knowing that appropriate attention to detail is being applied to these issues.

I’m also aware that Brad does this on an individual level and can appreciate that as well.

Finally, I would like to get to my “****-poor” hosting comment as it seems I might have hit a nerve. For that I do apologize and I usually try to be more tactful with my comments on the boards. But, I will give you some reasoning behind my comment, and simply put, it comes down to one thing:

• Tape Backups
[/b][/quote]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'>
The farthest back I can go is around February of this year.
[/b][/quote]

Whoa whoa whoa, hold the phone. TMS only lost two weeks of information due to corruption from the RAID controller and adjacent "near-line" backup system. All original information from Day One, Topic One, Post One (link) on January 29th, 2004 to a date in late April is still here! If you are missing something in searches or browsing the forums, you may have your "show posts from" field set to low. (It's down in the bottom right hand corner of a subforum)

For reference, TMS is backed up to a "near-line" disk system (full backup then incrementals) and then committed to tape via a synthetic consolidation of backups. The tape backup system did its job after the failure because the corruption committed to the RAID array was also committed to the "near-line" backup system.

We appreciate the concern and always welcome suggestions. If we decide we know it all, that's a signal for when it's time to checkout!

-Nathan