Why we were gone for three weeks...

Is anyone interested in hearing about this? I was going to post the whole sordid story on the front page, but I don't think anyone really cares. If anyone is interested in the gory details let me know and I'll try to explain.

If anyone else thinks they know, feel free to start all sorts of unfounded rumors. They would probably be a lot more interesting than the truth.

 

...anyone else but Kitana, I meant.

 

It’s nothing exciting or depraved at all and you are all going to be disappointed.

It has to do with our old host provide www.internetconnection.net. We had been with them for over a year, and had always received complaints that our site was slow. We figured that it was just the complaining individual’s internet connection and assumed that they were just some dumbass using a 28K modem and emailing us that the movies took too long to load. We never paid it much attention.

A few months ago, Freakfarm.com moved to our server too because of a problem he was having with his host. That’s a whole other ordeal that involves embezzlement and murder. Maybe he’ll be nice enough to post that story here too. It’s much more interesting.

Freakfarm’s traffic immediately dropped to less than half of what it was after moving to our server. This was a pretty clear indication to us that something was definitely up with our host.

We started complaining seriously to them and they told us that, even though they advertised that they have an OC3, multiple ds-3s and a few ds-1s, that they only had a burstable, or fractional oc-3 and that one of their upstream providers had screwed them over and that they had to place all of their traffic on this single line. It was seriously overloaded, and so our site came to a screeching halt. It had been this way for nearly two months.

They assured us that this was only temporary and that they were working hard to move all of their dedicated servers to their offices in Easton, MD. Before this all happened, they had all of their dedicated servers and all of their multiple-site servers in some place in Annapolis. I’m guessing that whatever company they co-located their servers with was the one who started all the trouble, and probably lied to Internetconnection about what they were able to provide to them

Either way, we agreed to stay and they promised that they would have multiple ds-3s through 5 different providers in their main offices in less than 30 days. We agreed to stick around, but stopped paying out bill. After all, it’s hardly fair to pay for services that they were unable to provide, and from what we could tell, our site had suffered serious damage because they never had the bandwidth that they claimed they did. How many of you never subscribed to Fugly, or cancelled your membership because the site was so painfully slow? We certainly couldn’t provide enough advertising space to get paid, and so there was virtually no revenue coming in for Fugly.com.

We waited and waited, and it took a lot longer than they said to get our server moved. When they did, they stuck it on a line that was limited to 2 Mbit. We use a LOT more bandwidth than that, and so we were fucked again. We weren’t bringing in revenue sufficient to pay for the server costs because the site was so slow, and after they “fixed” it, they limited the bandwidth to 2 Mbit (they claim) because we were so far behind on our bill. I spoke with their one and only support person for dedicated servers and he said that they only had a 2 Mbit line in there but that they were going to get 4 of them in soon. That’s still only 8Mbits of bandwidth total for ALL of their dedicated servers. Fugly.com, at peak times of the day, uses 2/3 of that all by itself. So if we would have left it where it was, we would have been stuck on a 2Mbit line until we managed to pay off thousands of dollars that we supposedly owe to these guys for bandwidth and support services. At minimum wage, which in Maryland these days is $4.75, we would have had our site back up sometime in March of next year.

We admit that we did use bandwidth but to be fair, we think that there ought to be some consideration for the amount of business we lost, or never got because they weren’t able to provide the services that they claim they can. Services that are clearly spelled out on their website, but are unavailable to customers.

This went on for another month and finally Freakfarm moved his site to a new host. He hates our guts now and is suing us to recover damages that we supposedly caused to his business. To be fair, we are pretty guilty. We promised him that we had all of this bandwidth and that our host could handle the traffic. After his traffic dropped, we strung him along for months, promising him that it would be fixed soon. When it finally was “fixed”, it was slower than ever before. We’ve apologized to him over and over and agreed not to charge him for ANY of the bandwidth he used while on our server, but that’s not enough for him. He was trying to sell his site, and because of us, he wasn’t able to. I’m not sure how that will all pan out.

We decided the best thing to do was to move to a new host. After all, when Freakfarm moved his site we could see a huge speed increase on it. We shut down our server and re-directed our site to www.internetconnection.net while we waited for our new server to be set up. We did this for two reasons. One, so they wouldn’t just pull the plug on us, and two, to try to pay off some of this bill that we ran up.

It normally doesn’t take three weeks to move a server, but we didn’t get off to a very good start with our new host either. The server was originally located in Ohio, but because of some of our content, it had to be moved to California. People in Ohio have all sorts of laws against retards. They aren’t allowed to own homes or reproduce, and there’s some obscure law against the electronic transmission of people with Down syndrome. I don’t really understand it, but I’ll never go to Ohio again.

We have just now finished moving all of our data from our old server to our new one and if you have a fast connection, you will see a huge increase in speed.

That’s the short version. Depending on how things go with Internetconnection and our new host, you might get the long, ranting, red-faced, spit-flying-out of my mouth as I scream obscenities version, but I’ll hold off on that until later.

-Martin

 

I told you so.