RPG Maker Times & Companion (and its subdomains) are back online.
On and off for a while now the blogsite has been experiencing "500 – Internal Server" and "508 – Resource Limit Reached" errors with no apparent resolution. There weren’t any set patterns as to when they’d occurred either, seemingly randomly, including when I was writing and publishing posts, so I’d often lose the content and had to start again.
From there it was a matter of pinpointing the exact nature of the problem, a long process of sifting through error logs and root files. Having a 500 error made no sense at all since the databases, site settings, plugins and coding are always kept up-to-date and backed up. This inferred a server-side error, but this wasn’t the root of the problem. A 500 error basically says, "Houston, we have a problem, but we don’t know what that is exactly. Please advise!"
And so the problem escalated and the 508 error in particular increased. My web host’s tech support and I started digging, using that as a basis. It made little sense that the blogsite and subdomains should reach its resource limit, since it’s unlimited (storage, bandwidth, subdomains, etc.) and there weren’t massive uploads/downloads that would put a strain on the server.
Long story short: It was eventually ascertained – unofficially, as far as I’m concerned – that the frequency of the 508 error started occurring shortly after the blogsite(s) saw a sudden increase in overall traffic. When a post is published, it’s also auto-sent to Twitter, Google+ and Facebook, and my partners also launched a small campaign to promote RPG Maker Times & Companion, including SEO-friendly tweaks and advertisements.
As a result, the blogsite(s) saw an overall consistent traffic increase of 40% for several months, which was actually quite unexpected. And this may have contributed – directly or indirectly – towards the resource limits being reached, even on an unlimited program.
RPG Maker Times & Companion and its subdomains are now "floating on the cloud", so uptime should be much more reliable in case something like this occurs again, and puts less strain on my web host’s servers.
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