Well it’s been an interesting few days here at BikePortland.org headquarters. I’ve gotten a crash course in web servers and I’m happy to finally say that the troubles are behind us (knock on wood).
Here’s a quick recap:
Monday morning my web host suspended my account because I overloaded their servers with too many requests. I was sharing server space with other sites and according to my host I was using 87% of the server (I’m only supposed to use around 1%). Below is a graph of the traffic just prior to the crash:
This was the second Monday in a row this happened so I decided to upgrade my hosting plan and move to a dedicated server. Unfortunately the migration to the new server wasn’t smooth so the outage was prolonged until just a few minutes ago.
Now I’ll try and get things back in order.
I feel like I lost a ton of momentum. Monday morning I was flying high…I’d just noticed my Starbucks story had spread all over the country, and I was excited to share a report and photos from my weekend of cyclocross racing.
When the site died, it was like all the wind left the sails.
It may not seem like a big deal to you, but this site is my main source of income and to lose tens of thousands of pageviews and thousands of visits is a real bummer.
The good news is my new hosting plan should keep things running smoothly, no matter how much traffic I get.
But, the bad news is that instead of paying $7.00 a month for an entry-level hosting plan (which I’ve been on since the beginning), I am now paying $135.00 per month.
So, if you haven’t bought a raffle ticket yet to win the awesome Raleigh One Way commuter bike, now would be a great time. You’ve only got a few days left before I pick the lucky winner (it could be you!), and I could really use the support.
Tickets are only $4 each and smart people buy more than one! ;-). Visit the Raffle Page to purchase your tickets.
Thanks to the readers who helped me out with tech support in the last few days and thank you to everyone for your patience and understanding. I’ve got some great stories to share and I look forward to getting back in the swing of things.
yay!
thanks for all your hard work jonathan!
Another easy suggestion for helping to support Jonathan and this site: If you are a FireFox/Adblock user, make an exception for “http://bikeportland.org/*” so that Google’s adsense adverts will render. That will ensure that Google helps support this site!
I was rootin’ for you Jon. I knew that you were probably running around with your hair on fire, so I didn’t want to call you and bug you.
Just makes me realize how much I dig your site.
Yay is right!
And hey did you notice that ODOT fixed the fence?
T.
Thanks for the heads up on ad blocking, mike. I don’t have Firefox Adblock, but my Norton Internet Security does block ads. It took me a bit of digging around the Norton menus, but I finally figured out where to put the exception! For everyone else that wants to do the same, open up Norton and goto:
Norton AntiSpam > Status & Settings > Ad Blocking. Click on ‘Configure’, then click ‘Advanced’ button. At the bottom of the Advanced screen, click ‘Add Site’ button, and enter ‘bikeportland.org’ and click OK.
Finally, bikeportland.org should appear in the Advanced Window. Click on it, then click the ‘Add…’ button under Ad Blocking. Select ‘Permit’ and type in ‘/’ in the box. Hit OK and that should do it… phew!
Now I finally know who those sponsors at the top of the page are. Good luck with the new server jonathan!
Glad you’re back up, Jonathan. I know it’s been hectic!
This looks like it happened in a matter of hours, sounds fishy to me; are these real views or spam attacks of some type?? Was it right after some particular post? Btw, the site seems to load a bit slower now, you might still have some bugs to work on, but glad you’re back!
There has to be something more than a raffle that we can do to support the site. What I mean is, if OPB can do it, we can do it too:
I would like to propose the BikePortland.org pledge drive.
This site needs our help, and we as the bike community should show our support. There won’t be any ringing phones, no tote bags, no iPod Nano giveaways (well, maybe a Raleigh giveaway); but you will go to sleep at night knowing you put some good karma into the world, and wake up to a pipin’ hot mug of local cycling news in the morning.
Maybe it’s just 20 bucks, maybe it’s just a dollar a day. But click on the PayPal Donate button to your right, and contribute a little cash to a great cause.
Here’s to you angoing success!
All that for a few hundred hits an hour. jeeze!
i like the idea of some sort of pledge drive.
lets say we did something for a month.
if ONE person pledged to fork over 10 CENTS for each mile of MY commute to and from work:
it would generate 32 bucks.
thats just an example of one of the many possibilities.
and i’m sure theres a bunch of businesses that would love some green PR by sponsoring people who choose to bike through the winter.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder. I think we all missed bikeportland.org over the past few days. I’ll be making a healthy donation after the election. Thanks Jonathan, this is a great resource for Portland cyclists.
Glad to see things working again too.
I’d like to echo the comment that pages load more slowly. If you’re paying more, certainly seems you should get all the service you’re paying for (assuming it’s a server issue).
I realize the site is painfully slow and that’s because my new plan is actually not higher performance. It’s a dedicated server, but it has less RAM (speed) than my old plan.
It’s a long story, but bottom line is that I need to upgrade the RAM. Unfortunately this would add on at least another $20 a month in hosting fees and there’s already much hue and cry about this new expense here in the Maus house.
I need to find either web hosting donor, a grant, or some other way to pay the $160 or so bucks a month to host this site.
Anyone know a web host who might be interested in helping out?