Monday, November 21, 2005

New home   posted by Razib @ 11/21/2005 12:28:00 PM
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As most of you probably noticed last week this site was down due to "support/billing" issues. Here is what was going on: this website regularly taxes the contractual parameters of every hosting service I've signed up for over the past 3 years. We never cross the line in regards to bandwidth or abusive scripts, but the traffic is enough even for static files. We've gone through 3 hosts, and each time the actions have become more peremptory. The last time they even refused to give me a back up of the site (I make one every 2 months, so that wasn't that big of an issue, and now that we are using BLOGGER there is a permenant archive of posts). The reality is that quite often webhosts throw out "deals" to lure customers because they know the vast majority of clients won't be using anywhere near the full capacity of their services. GNXP did use the full capacity, so ultimately, webhosts get stuck providing services for someone who is using more than their anticipated allotment. In the end, they simply point to a vague part of the contact and terminate the service (i.e., in this case "traffic abuse," i.e, too many web pages served, even though we stayed under the bandwidth quota and didn't run any intensive scripts).

But I'm now pleased to announce that two "friends of the blog," Elizabeth & Rick, have offered to host us. Hopefully there won't any unexpected outages in the future.