Back to normal

I hate hitting pot holes in the road... This little excursion was a real whopper. AFTR is now running, once again, on my small server.  The hopes of the new server have been throughly crushed, along with AFTR's traffic over the last couple of days.

I did get a few painful lesson out of this though:

1.  Level I techs at a hosting company will say anything to get your money.

2.  Level III techs at the same hosting company don't care what the billing, sales force and Level I techs tell you.  If they don't like your site, too bad for you.

3.  Don't count on the hosting company to honor any migration agreement.  I was supposed to have the full 30 day migration period to work out the kinks without having to worry about having the account cancelled.  Its clear that after 20 days, that didn't get honored...

4.  I'm glad I was paranoid enough to keep backups on my small server.

5.  This really hurt AFTR's advertising, search engine rankings, and the reputation I've spent 4 years building.  A lot of work has been undermined with this "bump in the road."

Well, back to hunting for a larger server to run on...  In the meantime, my small server will have to do and I'll have to think smarter in my code to make it work.

Bumps in the bandwidth

It seems that keeping my new host happy is going to be as much of a challenge as writing AFTR was and is.  I can't blame them really... they have a lot of customers to answer to, but its killing the site, its advertising and making things damned hard in keeping current members and attracting new members.

Hopefully all this will be sorted out soon and things will be somewhat back to normal.  In the mean time, please accept my apologies for the unwanted downtime.  All advertisers will have their time extended double the amount of downtime.