Eagle eyed readers may have spotted that this site wasn’t quite itself over the last few days. There was a distinct lack of dominant women, images shamelessly filched from tumblrs and my random musings on the world. Instead there was a lot of ‘account suspended’ and ‘access forbidden’ nonsense. There were a couple of reasons for this.
The main problem was me being kidnapped by a posse of leather clad dominatrices who spirited me away to endure hours of painful torment and indescribable pleasure. In my absence the site obviously ceased to function and fell into decay. While you were wondering what ‘403 Forbidden’ meant, I was refusing to hand over my webmaster password to a lithe leather clad lady, no matter how vigorously she licked my nipples.
The other problem was of a more mundane technical nature. No leather or ladies involved. Just a hosting service that claimed my site was exceeding its allocated resources. I pay for my hosting, but apparently I wasn’t paying enough. So without any warning or notification it got cut off. It was so cut off that even I couldn’t log in or debug anything. Obviously as a dedicate webmaster who cares for his readers I wasn’t prepared to settle for that, and whipped out my credit card to splurge on an upgraded private server for the site. Unfortunately that took a day or two to set-up and for the DNS changes to propagate across the web. It also involved a lot of me yelling at the hosting company via their crappy ticket system. Fun times it was not.
Apologies to anyone who tried to access the site recently. Believe me, I was trying to fix stuff as rapidly as I could. By way of apology, please accept this rather fun image from Men In Pain. He might be screaming, but it still looks like a more relaxing situation than my last few days.
Welcome back Paltego!
Thank you for all the efforts you make on behalf of your followers.
I am surprised that the company you used to deal with treated you in such a careless way. Sounds like they have lost a customer when all they needed to do was to remind you that you were approaching your limit.
Clearly, it is an organisation not long for this world.
Thanks. Always nice to hear from someone who enjoys the site.
For the last few years the company has been really good. A week ago I’d have recommended them to anyone. Now, not so much. Kind of strange how they went from good to terrible so quickly. I was pretty annoyed the way they cut me off like they did. I’ll see how things go from here. Moving again would be a major pain sadly.
Hope I can keep providing good content for some years to come!
-paltego
Glad to see you’re back and it’s all sorted. I even tweeted asking if anyone knew what had happened. You may have a few new visitors to your site now too!
Thanks Domina Liza. Always happy to get new visitors dropping by. Hope you’ll keep visiting as well!
-paltego
Have you looked at Digital Ocean or AWS for hosting?
They require a bit more configuration work up front, but if you can manage to run your own box it’s much better than most of the alternatives.
I’ve toyed with the idea of using them, but I really don’t have the time to screw around with all the various configurations and installations I’d need to do. The nice thing about my hosting service is that they do understand things like wordpress and will help out with php or sql issues (even if they were pretty sucky over the last few days). I suspect amazon technical support would pretty much ignore me.
The VPS solution I have now is like having my own box – as it has dedicate resources and I’m not sharing anything. I can use xshell to log in and run/upgrade/configure whatever I want. It’s more expensive than AWS I think it’s worth it to get all the extra stuff installed and managed for me.
-paltego
I’m relieved to know you were in very good hands during your absence.
Diane
Thanks Diane! Glad to be back in one piece 🙂
-paltego
Just wanted to let you know that your images are not being served. I’m guessing that an image include reference is misconfigured somewhere. Or maybe your images are still pointing to an old dns entry somewhere. BTW – this coming from across the pond in the states. Cheers!
That’s weird. I’ve tried on several different devices and browsers, including my phone which is an entirely separate network, and everything renders fine for me. All the images are hosted on the same domain, so if you can see the site you should be able to see the images. Nobody else has reported an issue, but that of course doesn’t mean there isn’t one. The fraction of people who leave comments is tiny. Is it happening for every single post? Does my latest post show up OK? Can you let me know if it continues to be an issue for you on future posts?
Incidentally, I live in the States, so we’re on the same side of the pond :).
-paltego
Thank goodness! I thought you had been convicted by your server of a thought crime and made to disappear. You would have left a massive hole in my internet habits. Live long and prosper.
Thanks! Always nice to get positive feedback and hear from someone who enjoys the site. Hope it continues to be of value to you for a good while yet!
-paltego
I see the images when I’m on a browser, but I no longer see them in the RSS reader.
I’m using Feedly, if that makes any difference.
Hmmm. That’s weird. I don’t use an RSS reader, so haven’t checked on that. Let me take a look what’s going on there.
-paltego
So glad you’re back.
I always start my day with your site.
Thank you for such an interesting and truly stimulating blog…and I’m referring to both your words and images!
Glad you enjoy it! And thanks for stopping by to let me know. Always great to hear from people who appreciate my random posts.
-paltego