As many of you know, the site was completely down yesterday.
My server crashed due to too much traffic. The culprit was my coverage of the Handmade Bicycle Show.
I worked with my host to fix the problem, and they tweaked the server as much as they could, but they said the traffic was simply more than the server could handle.
I should have foreseen this potential issue and taken better precautionary measures to prevent it, but I guess I learned this lesson the hard way (again).
This is the third time I’ve crashed my server (here’s the first and the second). After each time it’s happened, I’ve changed hosts and upgraded my server plan. I was most recently on a dedicated server that seemed to be performing fine…until the Handmade Show.
As you can imagine, having worked so hard on my coverage of the Show, it was a bitter pill to swallow knowing that thousands of people were not able to visit BikePortland.org on the day that would have certainly been my busiest ever.
With over 20,000 pages viewed on Sunday, which is typically my slowest day of the week, I expected over twice that many pages would have been viewed yesterday.
The site seems to be doing OK for now. But I’m not going to let this happen again. I’m in the process of switching to yet another new host. They haven’t even given me a price quote yet, but at this point, price is a secondary concern to making sure this never happens again.
Thanks for being patient while I get this handled.