Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying

I have good news, bad news and more good news. The good news is that many people who normally do not visit this blog visited here in the last 24 hours since I posted about President Bush’s Blitz-Massaging of the German Head of State. The bad news is that I suspect a large percentage of those who attempted to visit received a "Service Temporarily Unavailable" message. My shared web server at my ISP reached its maximum concurrent user limit and started rejecting requests. In the last 24 hours, this blog successfully received over 20,000 hits due to Mr. Bush’s G-8 antics. I apologize to the rest of you who were not able to receive content and to those who got through and were subjected to extremely slow performance.

The lesson I learned is that the blogosphere is a powerful message machine and can get a story out as fast if not faster than the traditional media. When bloggers big and small link to a story you post, you better make sure your server has the horsepower to handle the traffic that will be visited upon you. As soon as Taylor Marsh and John Aravosis posted links to my blog, all hell broke loose. Soon other blogs big and small linked to this blog. In response, my web server failed miserably.

So, in a long overdue move, I have decided to swallow the financial pill and upgrade to a dedicated server to host my blog. Sometime tomorrow evening, I will migrate my blog to its new home. Hopefully if things go well, there should be a seamless transition sometime tomorrow. The only difference you the reader should see is increased performance. If instead you see ugly HTTP error codes, you will know that I did a boo-boo.

So, next time President Bush massages a foreign Head of State, I will be ready with a bigger server to bring the massage fest to you the reader!

And, finally to my German friend, who wants to remain anonymous (I have dubbed her DDT for Deutsche Deep Throat), thanks for the tip on the story. I hold you responsible for bringing my server down. :d

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