Some of you may have noticed that the blog seemed to be offline for a bit on Monday night.

This is what happens when you get frontpaged on Fark.

Fortunately, my web host says that it will only cost me an additional 70 dollars a month for a hosting plan that will handle this kind of traffic: they’re giving me 24 hours’ taste of that for free.

Apologies for the frustration.

1. 
   Rachel Shaw 2010 01 25 at 11:57:16 pm

   Yikes.  You’re too clever for your own good!

2. 
   sherwood 2010 01 26 at 8:47:44 am

   This comment is… oh, the hell with it.

3. 
   Bruce 2010 01 26 at 9:02:24 am

   Your host is WAY overpriced for that amount of traffic.

   Bruce

4. 
   Chris Clarke 2010 01 26 at 9:10:55 am

   I agree, Bruce.

5. 
   Bruce 2010 01 26 at 10:42:33 am

   Chris,

   Thinking a bit more about your blog and traffic. Not sure what blogging platform you are on? I know with Wordpress there is a plugin titled supercache that really helps when I get spikes like you had. 

   http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/

   Bruce

6. 
   Chris Clarke 2010 01 26 at 10:56:28 am

   Thanks for thinking about the issue, Bruce. I’m always glad for knowledgeable advice.

   I’m using Expression Engine. Its caching is pretty robust. The issue last night — which is still current, because traffic hasn’t slacked much — was that I was running up to the limit on my account’s allowable Apache processes. I trimmed the tempate a bit to mitigate that but it didn’t help much.

   Long-term I’m going to have to switch hosts. Thinking about these folks, though I’ve heard bad things about their customer service. For now I’ll just let this tsunami taper off and then do something.

7. 
   omegapet 2010 01 26 at 1:31:04 pm

   Dude!  I warned you about the blog traffic.
   Now you’re going to have to stop using Nipton-on-Net.com to host your blog.

8. 
   Nanette 2010 01 26 at 7:01:06 pm

   Hi Chris,

   Sorry (yet happy? dunno!) to hear about your traffic spike. I had that happen to me before, when the Blair Witch Project came out - but it was not even for me or my stuff. My website address, at the time, was just one letter off from the Blair Witch people’s - and a surprising number of people simply do not know how to type, sigh.

   Anyway, I wanted to suggest a host for you to look at. I’ve been with site5.com for a couple of years at least (using Expression Engine). They have good packages, though I don’t know how comparable their prices are, but the main thing is… their customer service is *excellent*. If they were any faster, they’d be answering my question or solving my problem before it happened.