hosting

CuTy, the Flash 10 based VR viewer that displays the QTVR files on the IVRPA websites, is now officially available as an open source project:
http://opensource.ivrpa.org/cuty

I've been setting up an infrastructure for hosting vr-related open source projects on the IVRPA site for a while, and CuTy is the trial project for that. More to come...

The website has undergone another migration to a fresh new host. Unfortunately things were just not working out for us at mosso, and we're having to move in order to do what we want with the site.

This time our choice is Dreamhost, or more specifically Dreamhost PS. Their services have been tried and tested by the World Wide Panorama project. A big "thank you" to Markus Altendorff for sharing his experience.

Many of you noticed last January that our website then hosted at http://bluehost.com suffered some outages when they decided that ivrpa.org was using too much resources, particularly they blamed MySQL queries and took us off the air.

On januari 19, our then-current webhost Bluehost suspended our website due to 'excessive MySQL use'. All our sites, as well as the mailing lists (so in short, all our means of communicating with our membership) were shut down; a hard to miss 'notice' that we had outgrown the services Bluehost was willing to extend us at our shared hosting.

The elections for the BoD 2008 are underway (vote now, if you're a current member). Like last year, I have transfered control over the 'admin' user over to our treasurer, who is not running for a position in the Board of Directors. (Major) maintenance will have to wait two weeks, until the elections are over.

Since more than a year ago, I've been meaning to move the IVRPA site over to another host. Today it finally happened. At our old host, we had MySQL issues, we could not host mailinglists, and I was generally worried about the security of the server we were on.

Since around noon GMT, we're on Bluehost.com. Sofar things are looking good over here. Less cruft, and better security all round. Let's hope the performance matches what I've seen sofar.

We've been having some issues with our hosting. Some of you might have been seeing red error messages instead of content from time to time. This is due to issues at our host, CIHost.

We're on a shared server. Whenever someone else on our server uploads one or more very large files, the /tmp partition fills up. This means that other file uploads will fail, but far more importantly, MySQL will fail doing even the simplest of SELECT statements with an 'error 28'. Unfortunately, this seems to happen quite often. Looking through the logs of the site, I have traced back 4 incidents: