Well that was a fun 36 hours in the life of the site. It started yesterday with the rather sudden and unexpected termination of the site by my now former host. Not what I was expecting when I came to add the 'On this day' entry before breakfast yesterday morning.
After that, there was a quick search for a new host and then the move of the site. That took a fair bit of time but I'm pleased that the site is up and running again.
One of my worries was about performance on the new hosts but so far (OK, its only been 30 minutes and there's no one else using the site!) it look promising.
There is one aspect of the move that I should warn you about. On the pages with many images (eg the medal gallery, attestation papers etc), the site works by building a cache of the images so that they load more quickly when the page is opened. Normally I don't back up the cache because there is no need to do so but, having moved hosts, I now no longer have this cache and it will need to be regenerated. It is rebuilt by opening the page and allowing the system to construct the thumbnail images. On the pages with few images, this is not a noticeable delay but it does cause a problem on the pages with more than about 10 images. Before the images can be generated, the browser steps in to declare there is a problem with the worrying message:
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request
This indicates there are still more images to be built. If you see this, all you need to do is to refresh the page using F5. Depending how many images there are, this may suffice but you will probably see the Internal Server Error again. The most I have to do is 5 refreshes on a single page. The page will finally display. If you do come across the Internal Server Error, please help me and other users by F5ing until the page displays (You will need to give time between F5 presses to wait for the message to appear again). Once the thumbnail images have been created, the page loads immediately thereafter. That would be a great help - thank you.
I apologise again for the outage and hope this will draw a line under the last few weeks of problems. Fingers crossed!
Regards
David
