You may recall that F1B was down for several hours on Monday. I found out that they decided to change our site to a different server without letting me know. This created the issue. Here is an excerpt from the story I ran here:
After alerting Godaddy.com, they replied with an email explaining how our code could be really dodgy and causing the problem…in short, a form response.
I showed them another website I have on the same server with hardly any code that was behaving the same way. To their credit, a young man did dig deeper and asked for a trace route which I provided. The issue seemed to be on their end. They said that they would get back to me on the issue. Fair enough.
A few days passed and I heard nothing (which is unusual for them to be honest). I emailed a follow up today and the response was…are you ready? We changed your entire site over to a new server so please change your “A recordsâ€. Effectively a server migration with a change of IP address with no warning or word so I could alert our readers/listeners.
Actually, I can’t lie…the first email they sent was a hosting violation warning in which they were taking me to task and explaining that I was the cause of too much traffic on their server and would be put in a time out server for bad behavior until such time as I could fix my problems and they were convinced I was no longer a threat. It gave me several URL’s that were the most active traffic generators and possibly creating the issue…funny thing is, it wasn’t my domain, website or files. It was some other site I have never heard of. I think they had the wrong guy on that one.
They did reply in kind with an offer for three months free hosting. That was very nice and I was very excited about teh new server’s performance. They then replied with two other emails telling me that the new server they moved us to doesn’t seem to exhibiting the same issues and I completely agreed with them. The new server has much faster page-load times. But then next email I got seemed to alert me that this new server is only temporary…a sort of bad boy, time-out-in-the-corner server. A server where people go to feel shame for being successful using Godaddy.com’s services.
It was an email (3-5 of them total now) informing me that the original Traffic violation email did have the wrong information in it but it was still applicable and gave me the F1B files that were causing the processor usage issue. This is supposed to be an unlimited hosting account. They also told me that I had too many files on the server. Again, I thought it was an unlimited hosting account.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand that F1B has grown enormously since out humble and Spartan beginnings but no one from Godaddy.com has called, emailed or worked with us to help us identify how we may be using their servers in a way that could be improved. They just issued a digital junta on us and moved us without any warning and then sent another email scolding us for being successful with godaddy.com.
I deleted all of the files and cache they listed as some of the culprits but an RSS feed is a pedestrian usage and that is just our traffic growth. As you can imagine, I spend a lot of money with godaddy.com each year and unfortunately they are going to lose that revenue. F1B will most likely be moving very soon.
All of this to say that as readers and listeners, we will alert you to when the site will be down as we move. It will be a normal propagation cycle of about 12 hours but our email, domains and hosting/website should be back up and running with a company that has some limits similar to godaddy.com but have specific tools to help us manage that growth and are excited about F1B coming to their shores.
I have not made a final decision yet as I am waiting for a call back from two more hosting companies to see their interest in F1B coming to their world but so far, the red carpet and champagne is being offered by one particular company with a great reputation. That bodes well. We will keep you posted and thanks in advance for your patience.
