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Some of you may have noticed we were down for a little while yesterday. Today was filled with short “changing servers” messages and even cryptic server pages. 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 changing between differing levels of less expensive hosting plans in attempt to avoid dedicated servers. A while back we attempted running on a compromise between performance and price, a so-called VPS server which cost us about a 100$ a month, but we shortly found it offered no better performance than cheaper shared hosting. So we decided to move back to shared hosting and try to stretch it out and abuse it for as long as we could without getting kicked off.
Unfortunately, this didn’t work for too long either, because our level of traffic and advanced features put stress on available resources – mainly CPU use percentage – on a level of abuse never attempted on shared-hosting plans. This rattles our hosting company, who showed their displeasure yesterday by shutting us down without prior warning.
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, thanks to the final push from the hosting company, we finally went the whole stretch and ordered a full on dedicated server. Unfortunately, this change is expensive. We are now going from the temporary $100.00 per year shared hosting to a new and never before done $219.00 per month. Success has its price.
We apologize for the rather un-elegant way in which this transition happened, but we simply had no warning. The moment we got shut down we purchased the dedicated server plan on the spot, but due to the way the internet works, it takes time for the changes the propagate.
You couldn’t access the old server because it was shut down, and you couldn’t see the new one since it takes time for changes to propagate. Bigger companies usually handle this transition in such a way that you simply see things served from the older server while the move is happening. We didn’t have this luxury due to no warning time.
Thanks for your patience and for supporting this sites mission.
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