I almost don't know where to begin on this subject.  As most of you know, we've had some, er, difficulties over the past week here at OregonPrepSports.net.  We want to apologize to all of you and give you an idea of what happened and perhaps what is in store for us here.

As the fall progressed, the server loads kept creaping up.  This time, we really don't have anyone to blame but ourselves.  The web host provider identified OregonPrepSports.net as the source for the server issues.  Part of the problem -- it's actually a good problem -- is the growth and popularity in the site.  I've received several comments over the past week mentioning how people didn't realize how much they depended on the site until they didn't have it.  For some sports, other websites just don't cut it (I'll have to save that for another article - I'm sure many of you have discovered that "OregonPrepSports" is considered inappropriate language on a certain HS forum site.  The other potential source of the problem is the upgraded CMS system that I put in this summer, which required me to modify and update a lot of the code that I wrote to handle all of the schedules, scores, standings, etc on the website.  The CMS is still in a "beta" phase and hopefully some bugs will get worked out.  I also probably need to go through my own code and look for ways to optimize and speed up processes to become more efficient.  If only I didn't have to track down and enter 200+ schedules for each sport (a BIG THANK YOU to those of you that help me out with this!) and then try to find results for missing games.

Anyway, last Tuesday, our site nearly crashed the server several times during the day and they shut the site down (no warning given, other than an e-mail telling me it was done).  They had some suggestions, which I tried and found a way to bring the site online on Wednesday, but it was just a matter of time before they noticed it and shut the site down again.  At this point, I decided that it was time for more drastic action - I just didn't realize how drastic it would become!  I figured that if I was crashing shared hosting servers at one place, it wouldn't take long before I was doing it again somewhere else, so I decided to go for an upgrade - a Virtual Private Server.  Since I'm not ready to spring for a dedicated server (potential advertisers take note ), I thought this would be the logical next step.  It's still a shared server, but it's shared with far fewer people, there are guaranteed minimal levels of CPU and memory, and I have complete control over the server (I can restart it whenever I want, for example).

This sounds great, doesn't it?!  The problem is that I have complete control over the server!  I've never configured a linux box before, I didn't know any linux commands, and configuring web servers, processing languages, mail servers, and such was beyond anything I had really attempted before.  I wanted to dive right in and give it a go, though.  It took a lot of trial and error, several re-installations of several different operating systems, and a determination to get this thing back up ASAP, but it's finally back and running again (despite the efforts of my ISP to thwart me by providing intermittant service and the issues that can arise when trying to transfer 50MB databases).

I want to thank all of you for your support and understanding during this past week.  I haven't been responding to many e-mails lately, just because I've been staying up past 3am nightly for several days now trying to get this thing online.  We still have a lot of catching up to do with results from the past week, so any help y'all can provide would be greatly appreciated.

And again, we apologize for the issues - hopefully we're set now for another spurt of growth.  If you haven't noticed, we've added forums to the website for a trial period.  It wasn't the addition of the forums that crashed the site - not yet anyway.  We would love to take traffic away from another site, however!