Think for Alternative

“What is the best solution?” “What can be the alternative solution to go around this issue?” this sort of questions would be quite common in everywhere. Two days back, there occurs a situation, where I confronted with this question. It is when my web page displays “Error establishing a database connection” in a white page with the black letters.

Having experienced the free web hosting for two years, I have joined ixwebhosting.com six months back. Its the best paid web hosting with wonderful size of bandwidth/storage space.But While blogging on my previous post “Ayan“, I have been knocking this error message “Error establishing a database connection”. This wordpress error message is quiet evident that mysql server is gone down or has got some issues.

I was well aware of this message as this is common in free hosting services such as 110mb.com, kwikphp.com and sometimes even in awardspace.com. But, when I see the similar error in ixwebhosting.com, I couldnot tolerate, as this is paid web hosting where it is not acceptable to have this error even for a second, but it occurred to me for more than half an hour.

After a half an hour wait, I raised an ticket in ixwebhosting help center and I could see the web site coming back after 15 minutes.

Though this shows the unreliability of the service, we have to accept that these all programs which can go wrong anywhere, anytime and paid web hosting is no exception. However, I would expect some sort of load balancing mechanism implemented in ixwebhosting, to overcome such kind of disaster, to improve their reliability.

Also, Looking at the problem at the another angle, Its mainly the wordpress dependency on mysql, causes my complete website to go down during this issue. It gives me a thought over the database. And, I felt that , it is too much to ask for a powerful database for a single blog (mysql)!.  Is there a way to use word press / blogging system without database?

As I think, There is two alternative, one is wordpress plugin, PDO(SQLite) for WordPress and other is a usage of flat file based bloging system, FlatPress or SimplePHPBlog. Implementation of this is not a matter of question, however dedication and time were the ones that keeps asking “Is it really worth it?” “What can be the alternative solution to go around this issue?” and “What is the best solution?”