[Answered] 503 Service Error, Need Admin Help A.s.a.p!

[nemico]

I recently launched my new project Libertarian Global, its a global news and information site. Its a citizen journalism project, that reports the news from outside of party lines while providing a collaborative forum for conscious citizens, artists and activists to unite. Anyway, after our site launched on the first we started our heavy promotion process, and in the first 24 hours we gathered around 2k unique page views and at one point had 100+ people on the site at one time. I expected more but my users kept getting a 503 service error. If an admin could take a look at my CPU usage and see if they can help me out at all, Maybe allow me a little more bandwidth that would be great. Over the next few months our numbers are only going to rise and i need to make sure that my website stays up and that people stop getting this 503 error.

 

Anyhelp would be greatly appreciated. The Site information is down below along with a copy of the error text.

 

Domain: http://www.libertarianglobal.com

Username: LBglobal

 

ERROR:

Service Temporarily Unavailable

 

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

 

Additionally, a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

 

Apache/2.2.16 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.16 OpenSSL/0.9.8e-fips-rhel5 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635

[Ice IT Support]

Looks like you are going to need a paid host, HelioHost won't be able to handle the traffic your site generates/will generate. I apologize for any inconvenience.

[Krydos]

Your account caused the fifth highest load for today, not too shabby but it's really not that high of load. Certainly not high enough to get suspended for or anything like that. All accounts have unlimited bandwidth already so that can't be the problem. I checked Heliohost's overall bandwidth usage for all four servers and we're nowhere near our limit, nor have we been anytime in recorded history. I can safely assure you that is has nothing to do with bandwidth.

 

I have to admit that I find it kind of odd that you're getting 503 errors though. I've never even seen a 503 error on any page on Stevie. Usually high load and a lot of visitors to a site will cause 500 errors not 503. Is there any particular page that is causing the 503? Does it happen only on php? Only on html? On both? Are you using some sort of CMS? Does this CMS or lack thereof have a history of throwing 503s?

 

Usually 503 errors come from a page requesting a service that isn't available. For instance, on Johnny if someone tries to visit a java page while tomcat is offline they will get a 503 because apache is still online, but since tomcat can't process the script apache returns the error that the "service isn't available." Php service will always be available.

 

It's possible that if you're getting a 503 error on php if the script takes too long to execute. Since this is shared hosting we limit things like number of processes, script execution time, and maximum memory usage. If this is the case then you should rewrite your site to execute faster or use less memory, or whatever the problem is. Maybe this link wll help? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8202002/long-computation-in-php-results-in-503-error