vBSEO blew up server

Well, didn't exactly blow it up but....

I have been using vBSEO for about a year now with no problems. All of a sudden last night my site went down and it pulled the whole server down pushing the processors to 100% and being on shared hosting every other site on the box also went down. My host isn't happy.

My host told me that vbseo.php had collapsed the server.

I haven't touched the install of vBSEO so I am not sure how this has happened - my host has emailed me the log and advised that I can no longer use vBSEO for the safety of all other sites on the box.

I have had to completely uninstall it so I am not very happy as well. I don't know what it will take for my host to trust me again or how I will be allowed to use vBSEO again.

As a sideline I have also noticed that for the last year my traffic has been steady however in the last couple of weeks that has also been dropping down a lot so I am unsure if the two are related or not.

Has anyone experienced vBSEO overloading their server at all and if so what have you done to correct it - thanks!

Change your provider. No virtual server should bring a whole box down and then complain to you about their lack of proper setup.

Everything shows up as vbsep.php because thats how vbseo works... it sends EVERY script through vbseo.php. Likely, it's not vbseo.php that was the problem.
If it ran fine for a year and then suddenly spiked with no changes, the only logical answer is traffic spiked too. It's time to upgrade if your host can't support your peak hits. Removing vbseo is the wrong thing to do, and every second you are without it, you are killing your rankings.

Also consider that it may be time to move off of shared hosting to a small vps. Your site is likely more visited today than a year ago. I firmly believe that no forum that has over 1000 members be on a shared environment. It's just not flexible enough.

Good web hosts for VBSEO-powered forums

Thanks Brian but how could actual membership number be a consideration, I would have thought actual concurrent users would be an issue - I have seen forums with over 15,000 members and only have 2 or 3 people logged in at any one time - we have just over 4,200 members, most logged in at one time was 122 several months ago and we get around 400 members logging in over a 24hr period. The logged in members over a 24hr period has only gone up about 10% in the last year however we get about 8 new members a day registering. When busy we may have 25 members logged in and about 15 guests.

With these sort of numbers I would have believed that shared hosting is still viable.

If a script or process on my site suddenly steals 100% of the processors then other sites including 5 of my own can not function hence why it all went down. As soon as the host banned vbseo.php I was able to log in to my control panel and remove vBSEO from my install and everything came back to normal - with some other tinkering like removing the .htaccess file etc.

The problem I have now is how can I assure my host - who is extremely good at what they do as they also are the external hosting company for large car manufacturers etc - that my site can run ok with vBSEO installed.

I am asking for help here not for it to be just said change hosts

You are right, it is about concurrent users. But, generally, when you have 1000 members, the site starts to grow exponentially. Perhaps you are still ok to be on shared. But it budget allows, I would consider a small vps. Then can be had for starting around $39 a month.

Simply put, they do NOT have their systems set up properly if one site can bring down the whole box. They should have made virtual machines and guaranteed X ram and X proc power to each of them. If you go down, you hose the VM, but the server (and the other sites) are not effected.

At the end of the day, you are paying them money. And now they tell you that you can't do something anymore. I would have left already, regardless of who else they host. There's 21312312323212121312 other providers out there. Why pay one who won't work for you?

The host should have went through the logs more thoroughly to find the REAL problem. Runing fine for a year and then just blows up with no changes is NOT a scripting problem. It was access-related, hardware-related, or network-related.

I have been able to reinstall vBSEO by advising the host that it is a new version so we will have to see what happens from here - fingers crossed.

I have several other sites that use vBulletin in a very small way with minimal posts but provides the infrastructure needed for several vbDynamics install instances. There are many entries in each instance of vbDynamics on each of the sites plus the sites have vbAdvanced CMPS as their home page.

With very minimal posts in the forums like just news items would vBSEO be of any use to these sites in getting them up in the Google Search rankings?

vbSEO helps index your content. If you don't have any (or a lot) of content, there's not much it can do. However, with vbseo and a solid effort on your behalf to make topics and start conversations, it will start to grow easier than with out it for sure.

I have this problem too... my forum it's offline from yesterday. How can I disable vbseo without access to admincp?

- rename the .htaccess file (to htaccess.txt or something)
- open includes/config_vbseo.php, find
define('VBSEO_ENABLED', 1);
replace with
define('VBSEO_ENABLED', 0);

Originally Posted by vitoreis

I have this problem too... my forum it's offline from yesterday. How can I disable vbseo without access to admincp?

I'm having this problem too, and my website went down with the 500 SERVER Unavailable error. My host said I had over 30+ processes running at a time, which all was vbseo.php. I'm guessing theres a new bug or memory leak going around with vbseo.php

vbSEO Resource Intensive?

As a first point of troubleshooting, I'd suggest disabling your "top X" stats mod. Those mods generally use a LOT of queries, and frankly, they aren't great for SEO either.

The second thing i'd remove is the users active in the past 24 hours mod. That too is a big query.

See what happens to your processes after those are turned off.