I want to apologize for the interrupted service over the last week. I’ve been living through a tech nightmare since last Thursday when my server apparently reached its memory limit with no warning and the database collapsed as a result. Between epically bad customer service from my server company and the guy I was hiring to fix the problem taking a different job instead, I’ve been left in a no man’s land as far as trying to get things repaired. An old friend stepped up to help last night and he’s making good progress, but there’s a lot of work to do before we’re back to where we need to be, especially in terms of site speed.
My main concern is the user’s experience, and so my goal now is to wind up with a site that loads faster than ever before. That’s going to require an investment in a new server and a new server set-up, and I only have a vague idea of my options and the associated costs right now. But it’s an investment I’m eager to make after spending a week cut-off from you and my site.
Until that gets done, we will probably still have some problems because there’s just not enough memory available to continue using the current server. Hopefully, the site will remain up and mostly functioning but we should expect to load slowly. For the last couple of days, I didn’t even access to the back end, which meant I couldn’t create any new content even if I wanted to, and I couldn’t do basic administrative tasks. That’s appears to be fixed now, thankfully, and we’ll just take baby steps from here.
Thank you for your patience. This has been embarrassing for me, but it’s been unfair and inconvenient for you. I apologize and hope things we’ll soon be vastly improved from the way they were before these problems began.
Thanks for the update, Martin.
As always, you are more than worth the wait. IT support for small business is by and large a crapshoot in my experience. We have been through almost a half dozen IT support folks in 5 years, and what you have experienced is perfectly in line with the experience my business has had in regards to key hardware malfunction and tech support that ghosts without warning.
Sure hope you find a workable solution
In one form or another, I’ve been with your blogging community since sometime in 2005. I’m not going anywhere. I am grateful to see the frog pond online and running again, even if not at full speed yet. If you find yourself needing donations to the blog, just give us a shout. I know I chose the wrong career to actually have money, but I’ll gladly chip in a few centavos. Besides, I need to cut down on some of the snacking I usually enjoy.
I came here to say this. I don’t generally comment these days, but I make a point of picking up the headline stories every few days. I can’t really commit to a higher monthly contribution, but I’d be plenty happy to chip in on a gofundme for a tech upgrade.
Don’t worry Martin. We are here because we believe in your message.
Appreciate the update…I’m not a good externalizer; I assumed the problem was on my end.
You should price out the economics of moving to Pantheon or another company doing hosted WordPress. The advantages are is 1) you don’t have to do *any* server related ops. 2) for Pantheon at least, it comes with a world-wide cached content delivery network (a Varnish cache) so your pages are very fast, no mater what the actual uncached load time of your pages is 3) It’s super secure. The filesystem is locked down so most of the usual WordPress attacks fail when the exploit can’t write the attacker’s files.
However with Pantheon the cost really does sale with traffic, so it might be expensive for you. For sites I work on, the monthly cost for Pantheon can range from < $50 for a non-profit like https://www.theatrephiladelphia.org to many hundreds of dollars for https://www.timessquarenyc.org