So this is what happened.
When Boingboing linked to that first post of Photoshopped sci-fi novels, I got a major traffic spike. Such a major traffic spike, frankly, that it overloaded my former hosting provider’s server, which I believe was powered by a tiny mouse in a treadmill.
Now, I had had traffic floods before, of course, most notably when Fark found the Atari boxes post. That time, Hostpapa (my former server) locked me down for a few hours, then we had a nice talk and they reactivated the site. This time, they were not inclined to be so generous, and they informed me they would be suspending the account, because the tiny mouse was getting so very, very tired and they did not want to spend the extra three dollars for a spare mouse.
Amusing sidebar: Hostpapa updated their terms of service only a couple of weeks after the Atari post, defining their traditionally advertised “unlimited bandwidth and data transfer” selling point as “c) Excessive Resource User Policy: Resources are defined as bandwidth, memory, and/or processor utilization. A website is considered using “excessive amounts of resources” when it monopolizes the resources available using 1% or more of system resources for longer than 60 seconds.” Now, I know what you’re thinking – they probably could have sent me a personal mail saying “hey, we thought you should know that we’ve changed our service policy as a result of how you specifically use our service,” but I expect the care and feeding of the tiny mouse presumably is a multi-person job and they were too busy to do such a thing.
So: “fair enough,” says I, and I research my options, then sign on with a new provider which has me on a virtual private server, which is, well, a lot more expensive than I would have liked (given that my total direct revenue off this site is a whopping zero dollars – by design, since with all the Photoshopping I do I want to ensure that my work remain as much in the realm of fair dealing – “fair use” for Americans – as possible, and under Canadian copyright law such things as “profit” lessen the fairness of the dealing), but sometimes you just have to sit back and admit that gosh darnit you are kind of internet famous.
Which is like real famous, except that sexy girls are much less inclined to randomly sleep with you just because.
Anyhow. The VPS takes some time to rack up, as these things do, and then once everything is good to go I contact Hostpapa and ask them to transfer my domain name over to a domain management service, as I do not want to have to deal with a serving company again should this happen in the future at some point, unlikely as that might be. At this point, I discover that they want an extra twenty-five dollars (with tax) to transfer the domain name. Given that this is a process that takes all of five minutes this seems to me to be excessive – especially considering they got three-quarters of my year’s pre-advanced payment for absolutely nothing when they suspended my account, so it’s not like they don’t have a lot of my money already – but at this point I am sick and tired of it all and just want to get the site up, so I give them the money and say arrivederci, Hostpapa.
In summation: if you want to have a website powered by an overworked tiny mouse with which you plan to never have any success or readership, and then be suspended with no refund in the instance that you get reasonably popular, and then chiseled for additional money for services that should be essentially gratis, Hostpapa is the way to go.
Meanwhile, I figured with all the downtime that this was the ideal time to get rid of the headache-inducing white text on blue, so I contacted my good friend Tara and begged asked her to help me redesign my site, much as she did previously, and although there are still one or two minor bugs to be worked out I think she has done a magnificent job. (Hey, commenters – you can use blockquotes now! Don’t say I never gave you nothin’!) I should further mention the gratituous assistance of my good friend Rob and his friend Mike, who helped me greatly through all the technical widgetry involved in this whole schmeer.
Because I am shameless, I will further mention that the new server cost me a very great deal of money and that although you should not have to feel indebted for my personal choice, I would greatly prefer it if you felt indebted anyway.
And now, service recommences. Huzzah! Be sure to tell all your friends! (Seriously, be sure to tell all your friends. I really don’t want to have to go through the whole “where is MGK” rigamarole again, and a lot of people never got to see the photoshopped sci-fi covers when they were hotlinked.)
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42 users responded in this post
First post!
Great to see you back up MGK! You don’t realise how much you read a site until it’s not there any more.
Oh God, the “first” eejits have made it here too…
Wahoooo MGK is back in action *does the happy dance*.
Hmmm during the transition the link came up paraphrasing “MGK didn’t pay us so no fun for you”
Wow not only did the mouse take your money, then demand more money the mouse told the world that you stiffed him. DEATH TO THE MOUSE!
With a little more seriousness, and in the interests of giving a little more background to the nerds out there. . . .
Hostpapa seems to put thousands of websites on each of their several servers. There’s nothing modern in there at all like load-balancing, so they’re completely incapable of handling something like the slashdot effect.
The biggest problem was that this site, in its 1.0 format, was not throughput-bound like you would expect. Thanks to the everything-is-dynanically-generated philosophy of the site’s codebase, the database backend and the page generation was causing the site to be CPU-bound.
A professional sysadmin would have looked at the site, noticed this, and made a recommendation for improvement. But with hostpapa, it was just the guillotine. (On the new server, there’s supposed to be significantly better caching, so we hope this won’t be an issue, and even if it is, the VPS will limit MGK from “harming” other clients).
The final kick in the nuts though, and why nobody should ever work with hostpapa, is that they consistently refused to even so much as put a note on the splash page with a redirection to the new hosting provider. Oh, and they put themselves down as the administrative contacts and owners of the domain when it was first registered.
So far today, though, the new provider’s host seems to be doing fine. Tons of spare CPU and memory to go around. I’m going out of town this weekend, so let’s hope you don’t get farked/boinged or anything until Monday when I can babysit.
That would be the aforementioned Rob displaying his occasionally questionable sense of humour.
Finally! It has been a most horrid week without the wit and wisdom of MGK. Most horrid, I say! Great to have you back!
I just glad to have you back, dude.
^^^
Yeah, that should’ve been “I’m just glad to have you back.” As you can see, my enthusiasm is overwhelming my typing skillz.
I genuinely missed this blog while it was gone. I’m glad your hosting issues have been resolved for the moment.
Which, incidentally, violates not only their advertising claims but their own terms of service.
Huzah! Now we in America can read the sayings of our Canadian overlord!
(Seriously, the Hostpapa debacle sucks, and I’m glad to see you back.)
YAY! You’re back!!!
Welcome back!
Great to have you back, but to be honest, I think I liked the text format before. The new version seems harder to read =/
Welcome back MGK! Glad to see you’ve got the website back up and running (though the text is too light IMHO–my eyeballs hurt when I try and read it against the white background). Is there a way to contribute to the server fee, or do you prefer your wishlist of books?
You’re finally back, woo hoo!! I (well, with some friends) had that same problem a time ago with my (our) blog, http://www.calabozodelandroide.cl/, so I’m afraid all my spare money goes to pay those mean mice-slavering bandwith gangsters.
Jolly good show.
You’re back!
And that Atari link 404s me.
I definitely missed me some MGK. Even kept the site open in a Firefox tab just in case it came back between refreshes.
Welcome back. And I’d given up randomly checking the domain to see if you’d reeemerged yet….
Yay! You’re back.
I sent you something off your wishlist to celebrate. Enjoy some crazy Toshiro Mifune samurai action!
I just gave up checking on you this morning, and a friend of mine (Whom got hooked on you when I linked him to your Legion work) never gave up hope.
Very glad to have you back. You’re an important part of my websurfing day.
Now I know how rehab feels.
Glad to see you back up.
AWK!
you only think my humour is questionable because you question everything that’s an established fact.
Ah! You’re back! I was getting worried and wondering WTF happened… Oi!
Fun fact: Disabling javascript (such as through noscript) causes every link to point to the disabled site page.
I miss the old colorscheme. I’m a fan of light text on dark backgrounds, though I do tend to use light grey rather than actual white.
Oh good, you’re back. I can stop clicking on your link and whimpering softly to myself every ten minutes. (It was rather pathetic, seriously.)
Hooray for back!
Also, after your site went down, the top search term that brought people to my site became “mightygodking.” No doubt people wondering where your site went. You beat “little lolitas” and “tell asmar”!!!!!!!
Woo! Welcome back. Glad it was nothing more serious than a batshit insane host.
On the down side, the new format is unreadable on my Sidekick. So no more reading MGK on the bus for me.
Take it from me: ’tis better to be a Rob with an occasionally questionable sense of humour than a Rob with a consistently questionable sense of humour. I mean, take this (for lack of a more accurate tem) joke. Is it not questionable???
But hey, I am SO glad you’re back. The world makes sense again. I actually do feel indebted, plus I feel bad about you losing all of that money and having to pay more than usual from now on, so I ordered ya something from the wish list.
Same thing happened to me, Karen. He even beat “R Kelly Pees On Girl”.
Welcome back, MGK.
–d
Huzzah! But does the wishlist mean we can bribe you? Not that I’m suggesting you could be bribed, of course…..
I missed your weekly critiques of crappy comic characters, among other things. You should have threatened them with the wrath of Rex!
I’m just glad you’re back. Your archives and current posts are lovely reads for boring afternoons.
Welcome back to the wired.
You know what’s appalling? I just looked on amazon.ca and did a search for “wonder dog.” The results included many books about different supposed “wonder dogs”…but no Rex!
The world needs Rex in trade or hardcover form. RIGHT NOW!
Also, the man with the mechanical brain reminds me an awful lot of John Hodgman.
If I am a guest contributor on the site, does that make me sort of Internet famous by proxy?
Because that would be rad.
Glad to see the site back. Would you believe I actually went to the Torontoist to see if you were posting in the meantime (even if you wouldn’t, I still did).
Good to see you got that sorted! You had a lot of people looking for you while you were gone.
[...] last time, the traffic killed his server, but now he’s back with the third and final installment… Plus [...]
late to the party– but I love the site redesign.