Another Job well done

From Doug Hazard, Fearless Friday, 2019:

Fearless had over 4100 people online, at one point (Hogville was around 3K
at the same time), talking about just 34 HS Football games... the forums
(and site) were the fastest I have ever seen in the 16 years I've been
with Lanny as Tech Admin.

Everyone noticed how smoothly the forums ran, and the live scoreboard
(with built in ajax refresh every 60 seconds) purred like a kitten. This was
beyond amazing to see just how smoothly everything ran last night.

Every time I think RW can't top what y'all do, y'all go and give me that WOW
factor, once again

From Doug Hazard, Hogville, 2014:

Speaking STRICTLY as Tech Admin for LRB here: Hogville is an incredibly large UNofficial fan community for the Arkansas Razorbacks. Due to its sheer size, we outgrew our multi-server hosting platform and needed to have a solution that could scale up quickly and easily, especially during peak times (College Football and Basketball seasons). We heard about Richweb from another (current) Richweb customer (who also operates an SEC oriented fan community for the Alabama Crimson Tide). After doing our due diligence, we reached out to Richweb with a spec sheet of our technical requirements. After going back and forth with Jon Larsen (President) and John Donna (WordPress Guru and all around awesome guy), we mutually agreed to do a trial run. Since this was in the middle of football season, it would essentially be "Trial by Fire", especially after dealing with a downed web server that reduced our capacity by 50%.

We made the switch in late September of 2013, I believe, and haven't looked back. Truth be told, the solution Richweb offered Lanny (and I) has not only met our expectations, it's performed admirably. We still haven't broken the all time mark of most users online (currently sitting at 7,368 people online at the same time, on April 10th, 2012), we did hit 4,629 people online during this year's National Signing Day for the 2014-15 CFB season.

For the first time in 5+ years (I've been with Lanny since 2003), I did not have to turn off any features of Hogville. Nor did I have to turn off Guest Lurking. We had a couple minor hiccups along the way (basic server configuration tweeks), however, I can equivocally state that I have the utmost confidence that the servers will purr along as we get ready to enter our peak season.

We use a clustered hosting configuration so a typical sports site like ours will have these pieces:

1. Load Balancer and CDN (content delivery for static files like jpegs, pngs, etc)

2. 2+ backend virtual machines running apache

3. A MySQL database for each app. Typical customers are running WordPress for the front end of their site and board ware for the message boards, so 2 MySQL databases are used to keep the content separate (makes backup and restore easier).

We have custom software and admin best practices that keep the virtual apache nodes (vservers) in sync. So as your site grows larger, we just add more backends. The larger customers have 5 to 6 backends for peak periods of usage. Thats access to 50+ physical cpu cores when you need it as we use dual quad core blades for each backend physical host. We can also provision additional CPU cores for MySQL if the site is database intensive.

Most of our sports sites need a little database tuning and cleanup once we bring them in, and some help with caching and the speedups are generally pretty dramatic once those initial steps are done.

We also have 3 transit 10G fiber links with redundant upstream routing to 3 different carriers plus redundant firewalls so if you need to increase your bandwidth plan, we can do that quickly. Most small to medium sites sports sites use a 3 to 10 Mbit/sec plan, large sites may need 15 to 20 Mbit/sec. We allow customers to burst for special events, like a big game or signing day as needed - just let us know.