Today started out like it was going to be a great day on many fronts. I had a solid sleep and the sun was shining brighter than it has so far this year. When I went to bed the page views for Cuzoogle were heading towards a level that has never been reached before and I was secretly excited to see just how high they would go.

Going through the normal routine of drinking my tea while reading about what went down last night in the NBA. Sixers got jobbed and the Raps get Orlando?? Cool, that will be a lot of fun to watch when I am in Toronto this weekend. Sitting around with other Raptors fans and feeling the buzz of the city. Crap, the first game is not on until Sunday night. Well at least I am flying WestJet so I can see it on TV.

Minor things indeed. Back to the happy day.

I decided to do a new post that just highlighted what the local papers had to say about the Raps since I did not want to recap their embarrassing win over the Heat.

All finished and published. Uh oh.That was the last thing I remember before the blog went down yet again.

Babes of Survivor strike again.

Of course this time it was just Cuzoogle and not everything hosted on Host Gator so I figured it was minor and would be back up in no time.

Fast foward to 3pm local time, six hours later and the site is still down.

At least I finally got a reason.

The reason your site is not loading is because it is under high load and the mysql server will not accept any more connections. I tried to kill the active connections, but they were reloading so fast that it just timed out again. You will probably need to upgrade to a dedicated server to continue the usage you are experiencing.

Sincerely,
Devon D.
HostGator.COM

Great, I pretty much knew that many hours ago and it took until now to get word.

Sadly I only could see one solution to this and it really hurt me to do it.

I contacted SI.com and asked them to remove the inbound link from their Extra Mustard page. That was the cause of the blowup and at times yesterday there were over 400 people on the blog at once.

Funny they got back to me in about 2 minutes while I have spent several hours waiting to hear from my hosting provider.

So here is what I learned.

A post about Survivor Babes plus SI.com plus Host Gator equal meltdown.

Once I am up and running again I will be seeking out a better host that can fill my needs as Cuzoogle grows. It seems really sad that success turns out to be failure in this example.

The good news is there are so many people knocking on the door that I know the traffic is there. Now I just need to find a house to hold all the people.

Some have suggested Blue Host and I will be checking them out for sure.

In terms of customer service I don’t expect miracles, I know a large company like Host Gator has many, many issues all at the same time.

My complaint is the endless runaround I got depending on who I talked to. Communication breakdown probably led to at least 50% of my downtime. That hurts when your whole business is based on people have uptime.

Lesson learned on my end. When looking to grow make sure your blog or site has the capacity to do that growing.

Sure some cash was lost on the advertising and page views but in the big picture it was a good thing to learn as Cuzoogle continues to grow and expand.

Damn you Babes of Survivor and all of the fans out there just wanting to vote.

Hopefully you will be reading this soon since that would mean the blog is back up and running.

Crossing fingers.

Too much Mustard

A little image to show the SI.com influence. Keep in mind both of the last two days the blog was down for five-six hours. Who knows what the totals could of been.

Popularity: 1% [?]

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