[kde-community] Blog availability

[Ben Cooksley]

Hi everyone,

Of late planet has been having quite a lot of problems accessing a
small minority of blogs. This results in sysadmin receiving an email
once every time planet checks for new posts indicating there is a
problem (every 30 minutes essentially).

It would be appreciated if people could please ensure their blogs are
adequately hosted to avoid these problems in the future.

Some of the issues which have been problems in the past include:
database servers being down, blog software being inoperable, domains
expiring, hosting plan limits being exceeded and systems being
overloaded.

In terms of blog software failure:

Wordpress upgrades have only completed partially on numerous
occasions. Please ensure all parts of the site are accessible
post-upgrade, as the absence of .htaccess files will still allow the
front and admin pages to be accessed.

Ghost has been plagued with numerous issues for those who use it. If
you do choose to use it, please keep aggressive backups and ensure it
is supervised and automatically restarted as needed (by using Phusion
Passenger for instance).

Mitigating hosting plan limits and system overload:

This can be accomplished by shifting heavy resources such as images to
cloud providers or by using a caching intermediary like Incapsula or
CloudFlare. For those operating the server themselves, the use of
Varnish for caching is also an option.

Thanks,
Ben Cooksley
KDE Sysadmin