Spike in page views!?

[drupason]

What would cause a huge spike in page views on my forum? I was averaging anywhere from 5k to 10k page views a day. Now it has spiked to 100k + page views a day? This I believe is causing the problems my forum has been experiencing. The forums have gotten a lot slower and occasionally you get error screens such as:

______________________________________________
MySQL server has gone away
/home/content/13/6072913/html/Sources/Load.php
390
______________________________________________ AND
Service Temporarily Unavailable

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Apache Server at storageauctionforums.com [nofollow] Port 80
______________________________________________AND
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.




Any ideas? This is frustrating my members!

[kat]

Bots?

DDOS attack?

If I were you, I'd contact my host and ask them to check the access logs.

[drupason]

contacted the host this was their response...

Your site does appear to load a bit slowly but I'm not showing any issues with the server that you are on. If you try loading any static content on the page (such as images, plain html documents) you will see that these load very quickly so it appears that the issue is not with the server but with the code on some pages. The best solution in most cases is to optimize the code for efficiency to ensure it loads as fast as possible. (If your site uses databases, check those as well. Make sure all database connections are closed at the end of query.) If that is not an option, then you may want to consider purchasing a server for quicker loading times.



What else can I do? The forum is slowly turning to a ghost town!

[Illori]

who is your host?

[drupason]

godaddy 

[ApplianceJunk]

You may want to look at using a different host.

I recommend reading  Hosts, Hosting and Commercial Services

[kat]

godaddy 

There's your problem, I'm afraid.

Do a search, here, for "Godaddy" and you'll see why, I suspect.

[drupason]

Yea I know it's not the best host but would that be causing all these page views? If I switch will it even help or am I still going to be having th same issues.

[kat]

With bots and the like, very likely.

A different host will cope with that, though.

You can always block bots and the like, using robots.txt and/or .htaccess.

You can get the details using Google.

[drupason]

What hosting site is most recommended on here?

[kat]

We have a "Hosting" board, here.

http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?board=4.0

Might be worth you having a look through it.