Practically a cedar closet

Well. Here I am back up and running after we were so rudely interrupted. Turns out our old webhost (for we have turned our backs on them and their multitude of problems, poor support and perhaps a smidge less forthright behaviour than one wants in a webhost) was completely unable to handle how many people wanted to contact this page, (not that many, really, especially when you consider how well the “adult” industry seems to run online) and that my site was making their server “sluggish” (Considering that their server moves as fast as I do fair isle with my toes, I don’t know how they could tell.) so instead of doing anything else, they renamed my blog folder, put a new IP on their server and unplugged my domain without so much as a by your leave. (I don’t know much about this sort of thing, but that reaction to a whack of knitters and a sluggish server seems a little over the top.)

Here, look at some wool. It takes the edge off.

Lawool12306

Essentially (to continue a metaphor from the last time the internet bit me hard on the hind parts) if the blog is a house that keeps it’s stuff in a closet, this time we didn’t try to put to many blue shirts in a closet, we tried to open the door to the closet way too often. (Too much bandwidth) Naturally this would have been far less likely if the people renting me the closet had been clearer about the size of the closet, the number of doors we could open, or that it was a really big deal to all try to look at once. (Since the advent of bloglines, this is a really good thing to tell people about their closets.) Maybe let me know that the number of times you could open the door was sort of variable, or if they had warned me that we were opening the door often enough to generate a breeze that ruffled hair and ticked tech guys off…) In any case, there was too much with the opening and this time (unlike the last webhosts) they didn’t just close the closet door and lock it, or (unlike two months ago) they didn’t just tell me that they would only let a certain number of knitters open the door per minute before they locked it (throttled my bandwidth) this time they took all my stuff out of the closet and put it somewhere else, papered over the door to the closet and sent me an e-mail to that effect- after they had done it. (I actually got three e-mails. They noticed a door issue at 7:56 and the whole shebang was taken completely off the rails at 8:05.)

They did say they were sorry, but they won’t undo it. There are other people in the house who need to open and close closets (it’s a shared server) and I am in their way.

I know this is upsetting. Here. Let’s look at some nice knitting.

Lawool22306

Now, I might have noticed this sooner, except earlier that evening their mail server had belched and routed me duplicates (or triplicates) of the last 1400 emails anybody had sent, so I was a little bit distracted by sobbing and stringing together filthy words. Thanks to that little glitch I can’t tell what e-mails I answered, what I read or what I dealt with and then deleted. (I believe that this development may actually qualify my always-very-very-bad inbox as an official disaster zone. I’m looking into it.) Wool?

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I am resisting the urge to think that it is absolutely no co-incidence that the 1400 emails came flooding into my inbox when they did, and that they were actually sent to bury the three infuriating and upsetting emails telling me (in the politest possible language) that I didn’t have a blog anymore…but Ken and Joe think that I’m reaching for a conspiracy. As it was, I noticed about 20 minutes after the blog ceased to exist, when, like everyone else, I got the mysterious “Server can’t be found” message. I didn’t panic immediately though, since the service has been (for quite some time now) unreliable at best and a flaming dump of pig dung at worst, I thought it would come back. I sat and clicked “refresh” for a while, imagining no end of ways in which I would like to fix me a server or two (“fix” involving a sledgehammer) and waiting for my turn to open the closet. While I was waiting, I tried to sort the email mess (more filthy language- creative though) and found the emails telling me that they had dealt with their sluggish server by taking 9 minutes to think it over and then taking me off line. The emails said that they would put the blog back up whenever I could prove that I had solved the problem.

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When I regained consciousness, I tried to sort it out. It was unsortable. This may have been because my whole tactic with the tech guy consisted of saying “What? What?” and “I don’t understand what you’re saying but I think I quite like your tone.” as well as the ever effective “MAKE BLOG GO!” This guy was convinced that the blog was experiencing some strange “attack” where many people tried to all contact at once. (I think they are called “readers”?) He kept telling me it was like a DoS attack where one IP contacts you so many times that your site can’t function, but my attack was weird, since instead of one guy contacting many times, it was many people contacting one time each. (Again. Readers?) We looked at my stats, and I tried to tell him that this was a pattern, and he told me that clearly I had been under attack for some time and that he had protected me and the other people on the server from this malicious attempt by shutting it down. (If I am ever in charge of it, I assure you that this tech guy will not be receiving hand knits for Christmas this year, nor any other as long as he draws breath on this earth.)

Now I need to look at wool.

Klaw52306

Fine. Enter our hero Ken, who (once I found a new webhost who has promised me that there is nothing they enjoy more than the opening and closing of many closet doors) has packed up everything we keep in the old crappy closet and moved it over to our brand new house with a fancy new closet. This closet is nice. This closet is like a walk-in closet that you don’t have to share. (It’s a virtual dedicated server.) We can keep anything in it that we want to. We can open the door as many times as we like. We can put blue shirts, green shirts…shirts with polkadots and nehru collars. (If you wanted.) This closet has shelves for shoes and this closet won’t post comments twice or three times, and it won’t be locked one minute and unlocked the next. This closet is practically a cedar yarn closet it’s so darned nice, and it should (pleasepleaseohplease) solve all of my blog problems for the rest of my life.

Can you tell a difference? Are things working better? There may be some little things to work out as we move. (I hope not. This is all so upsetting.)

The only downside (well. Aside from the twitch that Ken and I both have now) is that this new closet is now the nicest thing I own (the irony that I own a virtual closet this nice but that my real whole house only has two tiny crappy closets is not lost on me) and even though it was the only way to keep the blog up and running, it’s a little (a lot) on the pricey side. It’s going to hold a whole lot of blogginess though, so I’m going to think about the money another day. It’s good to be back. I missed you.