Some of you may have noticed we were down for a little while yesterday. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for the messages and forum posts expressing concern.
AVfM has been dodging a bullet for some time by remaining on differing levels of less expensive shared-resources hosting plans, because our level of traffic and activity (real-time commenting, etc.) puts stress on available resources, mainly CPU use percentage. This rattles our hosting company, who showed their displeasure yesterday by temporarily shutting us down until we moved to the highest level of hosting that exists. So that’s what we just did.
It is actually not surprising. On November 2 we hit our first 1,000,000 visits to this site after 15 months of being online. Now, less than 4 months later, we are about to hit 1,500,000. This kind of growth was bound to be accompanied by some growing pains.
So, we have just secured a dedicated server, which should resolve this problem permanently. Unfortunately, this change is expensive. We are going from $100.00 per year web hosting to $219.00 per month. Success has its price.
This transition is happening as we speak, so there may be some more down time in the near future (even though the web hosting company assures us otherwise). Any outages, though, should be short and merciful. And when the transition is complete, the site should show a remarkable increase in speed on your end. Propagation should be complete within 48 hours.
Thanks for your patience and for supporting this sites mission.
