The SA MCE Community

Community Server is driving me nuts! No matter what I do, I can't get the stability of the site to acceptable levels.  The site is periodically down while the Community Server software goes into a error generating, event log filling, mad as a hatter state and everyone is presented with:

We are currently unable to serve your request

We apologize, but an error occurred and your request could not be completed.

This error has been logged. If you have additional information that you believe may have caused this error please report the problem here.

Now I know you must have seen this if you have been here a few times if you have been here often enough. Freaking annoying!!!  This also intermittenlty happens after making a post.  Anyway, these issues coupled with the slow responses are annoying and defeats the purpose of the site serving content to the community.  I do realise that Community Server is a pretty hardcore and scalable application and sites such as the XBOX forums, The Green Button serve millions of page hits a day with it, but I no mater what I do, the software will not play ball.  Maybe it's something to do with the shared hosting.  Who knows.

So, what do you think the way forward should be?  The way i see it, we have several options:

Option 1:  Leave the site on Community Server try and get it stable.  We may have to wait for future releases of Service Packs and new versions of Community Server until the issues are resolved.

Option 2:  Ditch Community Server and move to a new platform.  Joomla as a CMS with Simple Machines Forums springs to mind as a replacement and could be quite good.  I almost went with this in the beginning.  phpBB has got somewhat of a bad reputaion with some sites out there and I am hesitant to go with it.  I suppose any other free forums software would do as long it has good documentation, a large support community, is well established and works on my hosting setup. There is one catch with this option:  We would more than likely loose all members and all forum posts.  I have done some investigation and it does not look like a lot of people have written any migration tools to get content out of Community Server into other forum software (or the other way around to get other forum content into Community Server for that matter).  We would basically start form scratch if we swith platforms.  Not a train smash (especially if we can increase speed and stabilty) but something to consider.

Option 3:  Screw forums.  Just put a blog type site here to serve the relevent articles and community members can ask questions and look for help at other MCE community forums.

Please choose the option you think we should go with below:

If anyone has any suggestions, please give them.  I would like some direction from you guys, the community.  You can also contact us using the contact form or just email us at sa-mce(*at*)sa-mce.com...

Thanks

Chris

I have moved the site to a new host and so far so good so I am going to hold off on this for now.

Thanks

Chris