Increased traffic/Bandwidth Problem?

I don't know if any one else has been facing it but since past10 days or so I find RFD site has really slowed down and now takes ages to open up. Earlier I used to visit RFD 3-4 times a day now I hardly have the patience to see it slowly come up my computer screen even once a day. Is it due to increased traffic and slew of new member (maybe be due to Pepsi Ipod contest) which is sucking up all the bandwidth?

I have no problem at all
At work or home, the speed is just fine....

I'm on Bell Sympatico 3M/800 at home
At work, well, don't know, T1 above?

I find it really fast while at work.

Although I do notice it slows down considerably in the evening. Probably due to the increased evening traffic.

Same thing. After the major slowdown last week, things have been smooth. Occasional page not found and database error in the evenings every now and again. It usually goes away after a single refresh

Originally Posted by Carnage

I find it really fast while at work.

Although I do notice it slows down considerably in the evening. Probably due to the increased evening traffic.

Same here, RFD is too popular with the after-work crowd

Originally Posted by Absolute

Same here, RFD is too popular with the after-work crowd

Or the after-school crowd.

Ya today the load time is not bad but last 2 weeks were just horrible. It was taking ages to load up. I guess the traffic on RFD will continue to increase over coming months due to x-mas shopping season and boxing day madness.

I still find the site slow when it's loaded so I did a tracert to the server only to find that it's hosted with Home 1 & 1 Internet. My slowest ping was 50 so I know it's not the actual connection, but the server. Now I understand why this place is slow like it is. I hope this isn't based on the free packages they were offering awhile back. I have 2 of them and they both behave the same way as this site does without the load.

For a good example of a site that runs smooth with vbulletin, check out www.driverheaven.net. That site has 1000+ people on it at any given time and it always flies that's how I know this sites slowdowns has nothing to do with the vbulletin CMS.

It's not extremely fast I must admit, but it usually isn't too bad until we hit over the 700 online users mark.

I think we will likely add some more servers relatively early on in the near year... which costs $ of course, so we'd appreciate your support.

Other than that, just to clarify, we are not hosted with 1and1.

Originally Posted by Derek

Other than that, just to clarify, we are not hosted with 1and1.

How is this possible if a tracert brings me directly there? Who is the host then if I might ask?

Originally Posted by RVachon

How is this possible if a tracert brings me directly there? Who is the host then if I might ask?

I'd say user error.

What are you useing to do the trace route?

Any trace route I do ends up at theplanet.com.

Link

Edit: And RVaChon I'm just curious what's the address you're getting at the end of the route when you try it? Because out of curiousity I tried trace routing my website which is hosted with 1&1, and the server itself doesn't say 1&1.

Same here:

traceroute to forums.redflagdeals.com (67.19.207.84), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 192.168.2.1 (192.168.2.1) 6.240 ms 1.373 ms 1.282 ms
2 dsl2.ody.ca (??????) 19.847 ms 20.580 ms 18.914 ms
3 dsl2.ody.ca (Hah!) 19.904 ms 17.753 ms 18.797 ms
4 999.FastEthernet0-0-0.BB1.LON1.ALTER.NET (216.94.213.153) 19.936 ms 20.287 ms 19.897 ms
5 144.ATM2-0.XR2.TOR2.ALTER.NET (152.63.133.106) 23.939 ms 24.355 ms 23.952 ms
6 0.so-0-0-0.TL2.TOR2.ALTER.NET (152.63.2.77) 23.860 ms 24.027 ms 23.509 ms
7 0.so-5-2-0.TL2.DFW9.ALTER.NET (152.63.1.149) 59.952 ms 62.040 ms 60.821 ms
8 0.so-7-0-0.CL2.DFW13.ALTER.NET (152.63.103.222) 59.861 ms 63.164 ms 69.905 ms
9 POS7-0.GW1.DFW13.ALTER.NET (152.63.103.89) 59.744 ms 59.253 ms 67.802 ms
10 theplanet-gw.customer.alter.net (157.130.143.226) 59.611 ms 61.223 ms 59.041 ms
11 dist-vlan31.dsr3-1.dllstx3.theplanet.com (70.85.127.29) 60.857 ms 69.972 ms 69.845 ms
12 dist-vlan21.dsr1-1.dllstx2.theplanet.com (70.85.127.67) 59.449 ms 62.443 ms 61.329 ms
13 dsr2-2-v1.dllstx4.theplanet.com (12.96.160.8) 61.949 ms 62.144 ms 67.598 ms
14 gig1-0-2.tp-car8-1.dllstx4.theplanet.com (67.18.116.83) 62.274 ms 59.237 ms 61.927 ms
15 84.67-19-207.reverse.theplanet.com (67.19.207.84) 61.855 ms 61.918 ms 66.570 ms

Hey, some friends and I were thinking of starting something on the net. Out of curiuosity, anyone want to estimate how much bandwidth a site like RFD uses per month?

I was looking at hosting sites, and bandwidth seems incredibly cheap... 100gb a month for 30 bucks US for example... is that just because my sense of "what is a lot of bandwidth" is messed up?

Bandwidth is cheap, having a setup that can handle the required traffic is what costs money.

My query indicates that Red Flag Deals was hosted at Big Pipe Inc unitil last year and now it is at The Planet

Linux
Apache/1.3.31 (Unix) mod_auth_passthrough/1.8 mod_log_bytes/1.2 mod_bwlimited/1.4 PHP/4.3.8 FrontPage/5.0.2.2634a mod_ssl/2.8.19 OpenSSL/0.9.7a

My only question...

FrontPage????