Oh, how we all hate getting that message. A quick click on the refresh button usually takes care of the problem... until you click on the next link in your comic, and it comes right back! How annoying. How troublesome! What can be done to fix it? Countless suggestions have been offered in the forums, but not all of them are good, and quite a few of them wouldn't do a thing to deal with the actual problem. So, here's a quick overview of what exactly a 503 error is, and what you can do to help prevent it from appearing on SmackJeeves all too often.

What exactly IS a 503 error, anyway?

I'm not going to sit here and insult your intelligence by explaining what an error page is. However, if you've been surfing the web long enough you probably have run into a good many of them already. Most common is the "Not Found 404" page - what you pull up anytime the page URL typed in is incorrect or doesn't exist. Slightly less common but just as frequent is the "Forbidden 403" error - a page may or may not be there, but you are not allowed to look at it in any case. And that brings us to the topic of this article - "Service Temporarily Unavailable 503." In tech talk, this means that the server hosting your pages is unable to process the page you want to see, because there is a temporary problem involving either site traffic or server maintenance. In laymen's terms, that means the web server your page is on is very close to a meltdown, and has closed itself for repair. It's not all bad, because you can still SEE the 503 error, which means the server is functioning enough to spit it out despite all the traffic the site might be getting. But, it means the server isn't able to do much else other than tell you something's wrong.

Okay, so now we know what it is, what can we do about it?

Well, unfortunately as users, not too much. The error doesn't lie within your comic site itself, nor even the SmackJeeves site as a whole. It's a problem that has to be dealt with by the ISP (in this case, DreamHost), in tandem with the administrator of the SmackJeeves site. Specific to the case of SmackJeeves, we know that the 503 error is being caused by too many connections hitting the site at the same time. According to DreamHost, this is the result of too many comics being entirely too popular; they have dealt with it by force-setting a limit of 100 connections per 5 seconds, with the connection limit being reset every 5 seconds. Again, in layman's terms, that means every 5 seconds only 100 people are allowed to connect to the site. So if you're seeing a 503 error, you're not one of the lucky 100. Wait about 5 seconds and hit your refresh button and you might get lucky.

According to Dan, your local friendly neighbourhood Site Administrator, the SmackJeeves site is highly optimized, so unless some sort of bot has been crawling the comic pages and artificially increasing site traffic, the problem really lies with the host. To that end, the ideal solution would be to move SmackJeeves to a dedicated server - one meant for hosting SmackJeeves, and SmackJeeves only - one which is currently being researched. Users have to understand, however, finding a good host and paying for a dedicated server is extremely expensive.

The down side is that technically, there is not much we users can do apart from sit back and wait, and hope the problem gets resolved. Theoretically, we can stop visiting our comic sites or posting in the forums so much in the hopes that it will reduce overall site traffic. Realistically, however, forum posting has not been the main problem in causing the increase in site traffic, and simply put, we all want and need to visit our web comics, that's the point of hosting them on SmackJeeves after all! There is, however, one concrete solution all users can take to try and help alleviate the problem - it's called the Donator Code, and it costs $10. And, like almost any problem, throwing enough money at it will eventually cause it to be resolved. In this case, donating to SmackJeeves can serve a twofold purpose - comics you create (or like to read) can be given Donator Codes, which will guarantee them to run ad-free for an entire year. Additionally, the $10 you donate can go towards the cost of moving SmackJeeves onto its own dedicated server - an expensive option that wouldn't be possible at all WITHOUT donations.

So, as a recap, which suggestions are good, and which are crap?

So, again, there's not much we can do about the 503 errors besides donate, and report spam bots if you find them. But that doesn't stop people from complaining or making suggestions in the forum as to how to make things better. Here are a bunch of things which mostly don't help at all, and a few that do:

• Starting yet another new topic in the forum talking about 503 errors: Several of these threads already exist - it's best to keep your comments limited to observations and constructive criticism / suggestions in the current threads, rather than starting a new one every day.

• Get rid of "Spamalot" (or other section) of the forums: Dan has stated, forum traffic is actually not the cause of the problems. Getting rid of the forums completely would not get rid of the 503 errors. Not even Spamalot is having that big of an effect on SmackJeeves' overall traffic.

• Delete old / defunct comics so that SmackJeeves will have more memory: The site does not have a memory problem. There is still plenty of space available for any and all of us, and there is no need to delete any site from SmackJeeves, new or old, just yet. Too many users reading too many sites is the main problem; to that, deleting POPULAR comics would be the only solution to reducing heavy traffic - obviously an unacceptable one.

• Get a new host: Well, this is actually a good suggestion - if it's made in a constructive manner. Belligerent demands for a new hosting service don't help anyone. Well-thought, researched discussions on what possibly might be a good host for SmackJeeves are, however. If you have an idea of a good host, by all means suggest it in the forums in the appropriate threads. It might actually help!

• Buy a donator code: Money is one of the best ways to solve any problem. This is, in fact, the best answer to the problem for everyone.

Hopefully this sheds some light on the mysterious 503 errors and what we can do to prevent them from coming back.

- Enkida