Site Management The Cons Of Owning A Large Website

[Ravenfreak]

Right now there's a few issues going on over on Sonic and Sega Retro. Their mediawiki installations are running into issues, and there's not enough staff members online to fix the problems going on. Having a large site is quite a feat for any webmaster, but having one as large as this can become a headache at times. There's multiple Mediawiki installs for a few different websites. Sega Retro covers topics regarding Sega as a whole, Sonic Retro covers everything Sonic related and there's a few other websites that are sister sites called NEC Retro, and Retro CDN that are all on the same server. What happens when there's only a few technical Admins and the Wiki Sysops don't have backend access to Mediawiki? Things break, servers become overloaded and overall it's not a good time for the users trying to edit the site. What can be a good solution for this problem? Hire technical admins to focus on specific sites at a time. I know lots of us talk about wanting to own a large site, but are you actually prepared for situations like this? I have been a member on Sonic Retro for almost 16 years, and was always under the impression that Wiki Sysops were able to access the backend of Mediawiki but it seems they only have full editing permissions and that's it. It's so bad that one of the wiki sysops are actually hinting at one of the Admins to possibly promote a few Tech members to help out. (Note tech members are those with profecient knowledge of how various Sonic and Sega games work. They're not staff members.) Have you ever came across this on any of the websites you browse? Have you ever ran into this problem before on your own websites?

 

[joelr]

Is this an issue where more server admins need to be online or simply better server specs to handle larger loads?

 

[Shawn Gossman]

My biggest forum was Skywarn Forum back in the day. It had a catastrophic database failure. That was before I did backups and I lost everything.

Before I lost it though, I had to quickly go from shared to VPS and then upgrade VPS multiple times. I went to a dedicated server right before the crash.

It definitely requires more money and time as it grows.

Now, my communities are small but I have a blog that gets a few thousand visits a day and that is starting to require more effort and resources but it pays for itself and then some.

 

[Ravenfreak]

Is this an issue where more server admins need to be online or simply better server specs to handle larger loads?

I believe it's both at this point. I don't really see too many admins online on the forums at least anymore, and the site owner hasn't been online in a long time. One of the sysops mentioned there was an attempt to clean up space on the server, but it seems that didn't help since a few templates won't load properly on Mediawiki due to lack of space. One of the tech admins is on the Discord server, and another one has been busy with another website they take care of so he hasn't been online on Sonic Retro in a long time. Sonic Retro has a install of Xenforo, Wordpress, and Mediawiki on top of the few different installs of Mediawiki too which I forgot to mention above.