You may have noticed that the website was down again Friday morning and twice this week. It has been happening almost weekly, and we’re not going to tolerate it anymore!
A few years ago, we had this issue: spikes in traffic would crash the site—high-volume reader traffic. The solution was a more expensive hosting plan, and that worked for a while, but we get spammed a lot these days, too. Hundreds of thousands of attacks a day—it’s crazy. Most of them get blocked by backend security, but sometimes, we get crawler overload plus traffic spikes, and we crash.
And sometimes, three times this year (so far), the issue isn’t that but the hosting company server. That was the problem this morning: down for an hour. It’s gotten to be a problem (they are under new management).
Long story short, we are changing our hosting company and moving to a new server, updating the support tools. It’ll cost more, but we’re doing it anyway.
Getting There from Here
As part of a discussion about the problem and solutions, I was asked what I wanted to see. Apparently, there are a lot of options when you are looking at hosting services, but I’m not into all that, and frankly, I have only one concern. I want a website readers can get to and engage with—period. I want the site up and accessible. That’s what I want.
If there’s an issue, I want it resolved before I even know about it. We think we’ve found that.
We are also close to the new site updates. I know I say that a lot, and then there are delays. Three weeks ago, we were close, but then I had a chance to see the site with a different look. I liked the changes, so that is in process.
The new way the content is sorted and viewed has added some time to launch logistics that need to be overcome. Then, this week, we decided to change vendors and move to a new server. We had to find it and negotiate the details, and I signed the agreement yesterday morning.
Backups, keeping or deleting old images, files, audio, and video, reducing the site size, and getting everything to click through as fast as possible are all moving parts—lots of them.
The newsletter will likely be disrupted briefly (maybe not). We are still dumping Disqus and moving to the WordPress commenting system, which, in my experience, is better at alerting commenters to engagement with their comments ( a few of you have asked). And they don’t censor you like Disqus has been known to do.
We are looking at a new email service, dropping Edge Ads, and changing advertising packages to make them fewer and less annoying. And yeah, that means even less revenue and the need to raise even more money. The total raised so far for 2024 (to fund fiscal 2025) might cover next year’s operating expenses but not much else (certainly no salary for me yet). We need to raise more, and as always, I appreciate your help.
We have work to do, but I think this is all worth the time and expense. We will update the old site on the old server soon (I hope, but it might be a few weeks), tweak the bugs, make certain it works, and then migrate to the new hosting company.
It looks different. It should run a hell of a lot faster. It solves some lingering backside issues that don’t have much to do with the reading experience. And then maybe we can get to the VIP version of the app later this year.
And, as always, lots of content you won’t get anywhere else, and if you can get to it, I’ll be happy.
