An Apologetic Aside

Before doing anything else, I'd like to apologise to anyone unable to access The Sleaze earlier today. Thanks to the idiocy of my host, the site was unavailable for several hours. To cut a long story short, at eight o'clock BST this morning, a new story auto posted, as scheduled. It proved to be far more popular than I expected, with the result that, an hour later, the web host suspended my account! Apparently they can't tell the difference between popularity and suspicious activity! Unfortunately, I didn't find out about this until lunch time, when I went online to check the story had posted properly and was being indexed by search engines. About half an hour after sending them an e-mail pointing out that I have no control over the popularity of my site (unfortunately) and that I'd actually upgraded my account with them last year, to increase my bandwidth allowance to cater for such surges, they restored the site.

I must admit that I've been left flabbergasted by this fiasco. I never realised that being popular could be interpreted as a breach of a host's terms of service. I wouldn't mind but, as I pointed out them, even with the early morning surge in traffic, the site was nowhere near reaching its bandwidth limit. The potential damage from this outage is pretty severe, particularly with regard to the site's ranking with search engines: site unavailability is seen as a very negative indicator. Moreover, the past few weeks have seen a modest and sustained increase in traffic. There's a real risk that this recovery could be stopped in its tracks by an outage like this, negating the work I've put into rebuilding traffic. I've put some precautions in place to try and prevent this sort of thing from happening again, primarily signing up to Cloudflare, which will at lest ensure that visitors can see a cached version of the site, even if the account is suspended again.

In the long-term, I'm once more looking for a new host. I'm afraid this fiasco is the last straw. The current host used to be pretty good, but over the last six months there has been a noticeable decline in the standard of their service, including one serious security breach in which the site was briefly hacked (luckily I was able to deal with the incursion before any harm was done). I think the problem is best summed up by the attitude adopted by the current host in their e-mail to tell me the site had been restored. Not only did it have a very grudging tone, but I was tersely told to 'ensure the issue doesn't occur again'. Yeah, I'll do that - I'll be sure not to write anything popular in future. Dick wads.