I’ve noticed that the hair at the crown of my head is now getting sparse, despite thinking that the male pattern baldness gene passed me by, given my 35 years of a full head of hair. If it is not coming about genetically, then the past 3 years of server headaches may have been playing some role.

If I recall, our sites have been in as many as 7 different server environments since we started. We have a very finicky family of sites, where there always has to be at least one site that must bitch and complain in the form of irreconcilable DB or encoding issues. Well, nothing is every irreconcilable, if you have unlimited funds to press on and bring 2nd opinion and 3rd opinions in, and sooner or later after bring 10 people in to analyze the problem, someone is able to find the right recipe. We only have the luxury (which is still far better than most sites that have tricky setups) of having the in-house support team who governs the servers, plus we have a 3rd party server management firm who does work on a flat-rate monthly basis. If those 2 layers of support can’t find a way to resolve an issue, then the whole thing goes out the window and we re-approach.

The current issue is that we have recently moved from our dedicated server to a cheaper VPS (virtual private server). It’s a cost-savings move, given that I’m moving to Canada soon and a to-be-determined job situation to help pay down some site debts and maintain monthly costs. The VPS works well with all sites under our umbrella, except for the forums. The Korean language encoding was not working there and the 2 layers of support, plus my regular developer couldn’t solve the riddle. So the re-approach was to send the forums (along with theholygrillkorea, which also had an unrelated DB issue after moving to the VPS) to a cheaper, shared server run by the host who originally was managing the dedicated server. I figure that as their server environment and server specs are identical between their dedi and shared servers, that the encoding issue will most likely to resolve there.

So we just moved the forums and theholygrill to the shared server this weekend and I changed the DNS to point the subdomain to the new server. It’s not resolving correctly, as we are seeing a temp page, but the host is looking into it. Once the DNS is resolving correctly, we’ll be able to see the forums in their new home and see if the encoding is working correctly. Fingers crossed, as this is a difference of having to pay $270/mnth to have everything working fine on the original dedi server, to having the family of sites operating on the VPS and the shared server, for a total of $70/mnth (which includes the cost of both layers of support).

Edit: The forums and Korean encoding are working fine now on the shared server, so that’s stable. One hitch (of course) is the calendar of theholygrill site is crapping out and will cost about $110 in manhours to fix. Both developer and server admins are unable to stabilize it, even though it worked fine on the dedicated server. I’ll see if we can try another migration of those files to resolve the issue. But the dedicated server is going to be closing down next week, regardless.