Good Morning WBF Members
There has been an ongoing thread here at WBF re there slowness of our servers and loading the site.
whatsbestforum.com
First off, thank you for reporting this as we have been aware of the problem for the past 6 weeks. It seems WBF is truly coming of age as we have experienced huge growth in membership and use of the forum this past year. Over the years we have changed our server type to accommodate our needs. For the past 2 years we have used a twin CPU VPS as a server and this has satisfied our needs admirably until recently. A recent Google search of Whats Best Forum under "audio forums", "high end audio forums "and "best audio forums" these past few weeks have shown WBF anywhere from 1st to 4th position on any given day. For this, Ron, Julian and I offer our sincerest of thanks.
It has become clear when discussing with our web host that not only have we outgrown our server and memory capacity but we find we need a great amount of upgrade.
Over the past 4-6 weeks we have been in discussion with our web host re options and this week we have finalized our decisions. Very soon we will be switching to our own dedicated server which is a brand new generation with 8 CPU's and enough memory to last us for years to come. This process however will involve several down times of the forum to allow for the transfer of data across to the new server. Initially we must first update our MySQL which should take only a few hours but we are guessing. After this our web host will transfer our data to the new server which will be available to Julian, Ron and I tomtrouble shoot to make certain nothing gets broken. We have found over the years that transferring data to a new server is always a crapshoot because even with the best of intentions something might break and disrupt the smooth flow of the forum. So until such time as we can confirm this nothing further need be done. However when the day comes when we go live with this new server we once again will incur forum down time until the transfer of data is complete. IOW we expect 2 and possibly 3 separate forum downtimes to complete this transition. We do not have a firm date as of this moment but once we do , our lan is to post another announcement here as well as sending out a group email to all members to when the down times will be expected . We anticipate probably to start this in the coming week so look for the announcement and email
Going forward we feel very comfortable in the decisions we have made. This is a very expensive move up for us but we made up our minds that this is our best alternative . We are even considering adding a back up hard drive in case there is ever a system failure. With all of this in mind there should be a noticeable marked uptick in the speed of the forum as well as regaining full functionality of our 3 symbol Elastiserch. Elastisearch has been slow for months and this is because of the memory it uses . WE have been Tod by our web host that its functionality should return to normal. If elastisearch continues to be problematic we will in all likelihood remove it and go back to standard 4 symbol or more searches
We wish to thank everyone for their understanding and patience because at the end of the day it is the overwhelming use of the forum by everyone that has brought us to an almost standstill. We thank everyone for making Whats Best Forum such a huge success.
Stay tuned
There has been an ongoing thread here at WBF re there slowness of our servers and loading the site.
Why are the WBF servers so slow? PLEASE READ FOR FINAL UPDATED ANNOUNCEMENT
I like this forum and I like to be here on WBF. BUT: Why are the WBF servers sometimes so slow in comparison to other audio forums? For examples: Searches can not be performed and I get error messages, threads do not open and so on, especially today.

First off, thank you for reporting this as we have been aware of the problem for the past 6 weeks. It seems WBF is truly coming of age as we have experienced huge growth in membership and use of the forum this past year. Over the years we have changed our server type to accommodate our needs. For the past 2 years we have used a twin CPU VPS as a server and this has satisfied our needs admirably until recently. A recent Google search of Whats Best Forum under "audio forums", "high end audio forums "and "best audio forums" these past few weeks have shown WBF anywhere from 1st to 4th position on any given day. For this, Ron, Julian and I offer our sincerest of thanks.
It has become clear when discussing with our web host that not only have we outgrown our server and memory capacity but we find we need a great amount of upgrade.
Over the past 4-6 weeks we have been in discussion with our web host re options and this week we have finalized our decisions. Very soon we will be switching to our own dedicated server which is a brand new generation with 8 CPU's and enough memory to last us for years to come. This process however will involve several down times of the forum to allow for the transfer of data across to the new server. Initially we must first update our MySQL which should take only a few hours but we are guessing. After this our web host will transfer our data to the new server which will be available to Julian, Ron and I tomtrouble shoot to make certain nothing gets broken. We have found over the years that transferring data to a new server is always a crapshoot because even with the best of intentions something might break and disrupt the smooth flow of the forum. So until such time as we can confirm this nothing further need be done. However when the day comes when we go live with this new server we once again will incur forum down time until the transfer of data is complete. IOW we expect 2 and possibly 3 separate forum downtimes to complete this transition. We do not have a firm date as of this moment but once we do , our lan is to post another announcement here as well as sending out a group email to all members to when the down times will be expected . We anticipate probably to start this in the coming week so look for the announcement and email
Going forward we feel very comfortable in the decisions we have made. This is a very expensive move up for us but we made up our minds that this is our best alternative . We are even considering adding a back up hard drive in case there is ever a system failure. With all of this in mind there should be a noticeable marked uptick in the speed of the forum as well as regaining full functionality of our 3 symbol Elastiserch. Elastisearch has been slow for months and this is because of the memory it uses . WE have been Tod by our web host that its functionality should return to normal. If elastisearch continues to be problematic we will in all likelihood remove it and go back to standard 4 symbol or more searches
We wish to thank everyone for their understanding and patience because at the end of the day it is the overwhelming use of the forum by everyone that has brought us to an almost standstill. We thank everyone for making Whats Best Forum such a huge success.
Stay tuned