Pay no attention to the glitches and errors! We’re moving to a new host.
I’m in New York with my family on a work vacation (I work, they vacation), and have just spent a miserable week sweating in my skivvies in a hot, humid Harlem apartment trying to move this site to a new host.
You may have suffered from a few database errors this week and last. It was so bad on Thursday, a couple of readers on Twitter suspected we were under DDoS attack, like Twitter itself that day. We weren’t, but we were being hit by spam bots — and still are. There was a big spike in spam traffic last week and a huge one this week. See the chart below.
Whether the spam is causing the database errors or not, I don’t know. I suspect it’s a combination of the spam, the growing traffic and the crumminess of the current host. As we’ve grown, we’ve attracted hack attacks that infected the site with spam and Windows viruses. The support has been hopeless, which is what you get with the cheapest hosting plan on the planet. It’s time to move up to a bigger, better host.
We’re moving to Laughing Squid of San Francisco. It’s a local, independently owned firm, run with quiet competence by the redoubtable Scott Beale (Here’s Scott’s great Laughing Squad blog). Laughing Squid is home to a lot of companies and people I like and admire. It’s plugged into the tech and arts community, and renowned for its support and reliability.
I did most of the moving work myself, so fully expect it to melt down. In fact, I’ll flip out if it works. If you’re reading this, it must have worked. So fingers crossed, and please let us know if you spot anything that needs fixing. Thanks for your patience.
— Leander.
