Crazyguyonabike Server Fundraising Appeal

Recently I wrote an article suggesting that people consider helping those bicycle touring related online resources that they find the most useful to them. The article was written during the two weeks that Crazyguyonabike.com was unavailable for it's many fans to use and enjoy.

Neil Gunton, webmaster of Crazyguyonabike, has had to make a number of changes in order to bring the web site back online and available for so many of us to enjoy. In addition to his time he has once again absorbed some large costs to do so. One unexpected cost remains, the need for a new server to replace the overloaded server that used to take care of the site.

Neil has set a very modest goal of raising $2000.00 to obtain a replacement server. Personally I will be making a donation to his site to help him with this and I hope many others also step forward and offer him some assistance.

Even though his goal is $2000.00 I would like to see him raise more money. Why? Well as you will discover in the following interview Neil is currently unemployed. It's not that he is unable to work but rather that he enjoys putting his creative energy towards continuing to make crazyguyonabike.com even more useful to bicycle tourists worldwide.

Running, maintaining and keeping a popular site like crazyguyonabike.com connected is not an inexpensive endeavour. My guess is that he is likely facing monthly service bills of at least $400.00 to keep the site going. He hopes to be able to add some unintrusive and friendly services like classified ads to try to bring in enough of a revenue stream to make the site self-supporting but it takes time to do so.

He's been absorbing the costs of keeping the site connected for five years now. I would love to see us go a bit further and not just reach the $2000.00 he's asked for but also reach a little deeper and maybe give him the gift of more time to work on his site before he absolutely has to get a job to help support his family.

Right now crazyguyonabike.com has raised $1728.00. I would love to be able to hear Neil sound shocked and surprised to report that the bicycle touring community helped him raise $3000.00. Remember even small donations of a dollar or two go a long way when the legions of us who have benefited from the site help out.

The remainder of this article is an interview with Neil where he discusses what happened recently with Crazyguyonabike and what he hopes to do next:

A lot of people were quite concerned when crazyguyonabike.com left the internet for almost two weeks. What happened?

First let me set the context: The server was hosted by a company named ServerBeach, which rents out their own servers to people like me who want a dedicated box to run websites, email, games servers or whatever. So I rent the box, and they provide the bandwidth. As such, I am responsible for the software side of things, and they are supposed to be responsible for any hardware issues. They host the server in their datacenter, which is somewhere in Texas or Virginia. I had never actually seen the server "in person", which is quite normal. They have the servers and the big internet pipes for connectivity, and I basically rent one of these from them.

I was checking email from a motel one evening when suddenly the server just died. I initially thought that it was just a dropped connection, but then I noticed I couldn't reconnect at all, on any port (web, email, ssh). Eventually I had to remotely reboot the server (ServerBeach has that as a feature, for just this kind of occasion). When the server came back up there were no messages in any of the logs as to what happened. At this point I thought that maybe it was some kind of software issue, so I just left it to see what would happen. About an hour later, it happened again. This time I sent ServerBeach a trouble ticket. It went on like this, server hangs, reboot, stays up for a while, then it hangs again. ServerBeach told me it looked like it might be a RAM issue, so they replaced that. No change. Over the next week we had a back-and-forth about various ideas, and all the while they maintained that it looked almost certainly to be a software issue (in other words, my problem). They felt that some critical file(s) in the operating system may have become corrupted. I began to feel that it seemed more like a hardware or disk problem, but it went on like this for a week. During this period, the server was up and down intermittently.

Eventually I caved and asked them to reinstall the operating system, which basically means wiping the drive clean and starting afresh with a bare system. This means you have to rebuild all the software from scratch, which takes a while since there are a lot of little modules and larger applications that I customize on the server to make crazyguyonabike work. But even after they did that, the server kept hanging - and now I was pissed because I finally had proof that it must have been a hardware problem all along. They insisted that they had swapped out everything but the hard drives, but I have no way of verifying this claim.

Eventually one of their senior engineers looked at the problem, and he said the error message on the screen when it crashed looked like it could be a disk problem. I had been quite patient with them up until now, but at this point I got angry: This message must have been there the whole time, every time it crashed, and yet nobody had bothered to really look at it until I had to wipe my hard drive. In any case, they still couldn't fix it, and when I wrote an angry email in response to a form email they sent me, they then started ignoring my emails altogether. I think perhaps they hoped that if they ignored me then maybe I would go away... so guess what, I did! But first I called their customer service and explained why exactly I was ditching them. The guy I spoke to was very apologetic, but the most he felt he could offer me as compensation was something like a week's worth of servertime (i.e. about $30), which was how long it had been down. I asked him if he really thought that my time and reputation as a webmaster was worth only $30, and he had no reply. I said that the only meaningful way they could really make up something like this would be to give me a complimentary hardware upgrade to the next level up server. This, I felt, would demonstrate that they recognised and took responsibility for all the grief and hassle they had caused me. But he didn't seem to be going for that, so I just walked away. I got my old server out of the closet, set it up, and placed it with a small ISP downtown here in Corvallis, Oregon.

With your decision to leave your former Internet Service Provider you had to make several changes including going back to a co-hosting situation and using your old hardware. How has this worked out?

I had remembered my old server really kicking butt in terms of speed, but I was somewhat surprised to find that it was a little slow when people started hitting it. Looking at the system, it soon became apparent to me that the database had simply grown and so had the traffic. Some pages were taking over 1 second to generate, because there are quite a few database queries to make up a complex page. Basically on a website like this, all the content is in a MySQL database, and every time you request a page the server has to go to a page template and execute some Perl code to generate the page for you. This code goes to the database and retrieves the records it needs, which may span quite a few tables - for example for a normal journal page there might be the journal record, the page record, the page text (which is stored in a separate table for efficiency), the picture records, the author records and so on. All of this is used to build the HTML that gets delivered to your browser. You don't need to know the innards of this to be able to appreciate that there is a substantial amount of processing going on. Previously my old server was able to handle this just fine, but obviously with the larger database, it was having to process more and more data. This results in slower page response time, which means the website as a whole seems slower. If more people were to hit the site simultaneously, then the server would not be able to keep up, and would appear to be dead or unavailable as the requests backed up.

With the problems that you've outlined using your old hardware do you have a plan to replace the server with something new?

Yes, I plan on getting a new server. I have my eyes on a dual Opteron (64-bit) with 2 or 4 GB RAM and two fast SCSI drives in a RAID 1 configuration. In plain english, it's a box that should be able to handle the load for a good while, unless we literally grow to having ten times the traffic we have today.

A server replacement can be quite costly. I know that many people expressed concern when your site disappeared. Is there anything that these users can do to help?

Yup! Funny you should ask! ;-) I have gone to the user community to ask them if they can help defray the costs of a new server. I put out an email newsletter, and also put it prominently on the front page of the site. This has a progress bar (the goal is $2000) to say how far we have to go, and this links to the existing Donations page, which I have also updated to reflect the server appeal. So if you just go to the home page of crazyguyonabike, you should see the big yellow box on the left which is the fundraising appeal. Alternatively, you can go straight to the Donations page, which is at http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/help/donate/.

Aside from the obvious aspects of needing a better server to allow service to continue at acceptable levels will the move to a new server allow you to enhance/improve the service in anyway?

I have plans for new features, such as interactive maps to allow for geographical browsing and representations of people's journals. Imagine eventually being able to track someone's progress across country on a map, with a little line to see where they are and where they have been. Also you could have little pins on the map to signify journal entries. There really are a lot of possibilities with maps, which I am keen to investigate further. I don't want to use Google maps, because I don't want to be dependent on their good graces for a feature which I view as central to my websites; in any case, I am interested in having full control over the mapping process.

Also I would like to expand the site to allow for topics other than bicycle touring (though crazyguyonabike.com will always be bicycle touring and nothing else). These new features will also include classifieds and other kinds of tool that a community will hopefully find useful. Eventually some of this may even allow me to make some money and become self-supporting. In any case, the mapping stuff will be CPU-intensive, so those new 64-bit Opterons should be well suited to that task. Also as the site grows and more and more people hit it, the extra horsepower will just give us that much more headroom before we again hit the point where we have to wait for pages to render.

Bicycle Touring 101 and Crazyguyonabike.com are completely independent web sites. I do have journals on Crazyguyonabike.com but other then wanting to keep a valuable touring resource available for as long as possible I have no other reason for encouraging people to donate.

With that out of the way if you've used the site to host your own journals or to read about the adventures of others then please consider following this link and helping Neil out.

http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/help/donate/

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