HCC's Testing a New Server

In an effort to get our Jeep out of the river before the Hostgator eats us all, I've been working the last few weeks on finding us a new host. We're paid up with Hostgator through the end of the year, but aside from the considerable pain in the ass of me having to cripple the site to keep the 500 errors down to a minimum, we're also fast approaching the 1,000,000 screengrab mark, at which point we'll trip Hostgator's limits and the site will stop working entirely.


I've explored options for getting our grab totals down to a reasonable amount, but that's easier said than done since we can't just remove movies or shows from the catalog without leaving the caps from those movies or shows stranded without screengrabs. I thought for a minute we could just delete the uncapped grabs, and even cooked up a quick script to determine which grabs had no captions. Which promptly crashed the site and got our account locked for a few hours, because searching through 2,000,000 caps about 900,000 times is just plain bonkers and makes the baby Jesus cry salty tears.

My next idea was to move HCC to a new host while leaving all the screengrabs linked from Hostgator, the idea being we could ditch the 500 errors while buying us a little more time before our berserk count of screengrabs set off the apocalypse. I rebuilt the site entirely on the most reliable host I could find and... it was slow as fuck, and just me testing the site ate up our resource allocation for the month. Yikes! So that was a no go.

So here we are at step 3. I found a reasonably affordable away to get us our own server! Well, a VPS, but close enough. The advantage of this is that we can do whatever the hell we want, we won't have a process limit (goodbye 500 errors) and we can have as many screengrabs as we want. The disadvantage is that I had to set up all kinds of crazy technical shit and it's all held together with silly putty. I also have no idea how well it will hold up to our regular traffic.

Over the weekend I rebuilt the site on our new server, and this week we'll be testing the site at the new address, www.captioncrack.com. Yes, HCC.com was already taken. I briefly considered www.wtfitshcc.com but realized I'd have to spend too much time explaining that joke and correcting people who thought it said www.wt-fits-hcc.com, which would be annoying. Anyway, no need to adjust your bookmarks just yet, I've put up a redirect for now and I want to make sure the whole thing doesn't blow up before I make the move permanent. So far in testing, the site's loading noticeably faster than it did on Hostgator, but I still want to see how it holds up under the load of regular capping.

As with all things HCC, this was done on the fly and with too little sleep, so I fully expect not every feature will work perfectly right off the bat. I'll no doubt be fixing stuff throughout the week. What I'm most interested in is feedback from you all on how the site is running. If it's loading slower/faster than before, if it's going down completely at any point, if you're getting error messages, that kind of thing. That will help me determine if this is going to work long-term. I had to learn a bunch of new shit to get this going so I'm sure I fucked at least a few things up. Anyway, I have until Sunday to get a refund if this thing just sucks balls.

Moving to the new site, you will see a few quirks. You'll need to re-select your settings and enter your handle and all that, since your cookies won't port over. The "Updates" section at the top of your Ultimate Archive page will probably be goofy for the first week or so. There also may be a dead cat in your mailbox.

-Jazz