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.