I know I was making out that I had a lot to do in my last post, but I was not prepared for the level of craziness that hit on Friday and is still going on today…
I put up a blog post on New Music Strategies, just reproducing an email conversation I’d had with a local record label manager I know.
Some of the things he said in the course of that conversation were taken to be fairly outrageous by the readers of that website, and they took it upon themselves to go back out into the internet and then come back with all their friends.
In the last few days I have had tens of thousands of visitors to that website. It’s being talked about in some of the most read websites on the planet, and I’ve had something like 100 comments already on that one post.
In the meantime, I had problems with my web host, and the site ended up getting taken down for 12 hours on Friday night.
It’s been offline three or four times since that I know of, and I’ve had nothing but trouble with their technical, sales and support staff (essentially, one guy called Neil), who thinks it’s my job to find a coding problem on one of their servers and fix it for them.
The amount of time and energy required to deal with sudden, fleeting internet success and simultaneous catastrophic technical meltdown is substantial, and I had not factored it into the equation.
But still, the feedback has been wonderful, and I’ve had phone calls and emails from all around the world — including people whose websites I read for inspiration and indepth knowledge — which has been really cool. But I’ve hardly come up for air the whole time.
Lots of people have been downloading my free e-book, and some people have taken it upon themselves to give it away on their own websites and via their newsletters, which I actively encourage.
I’ve even managed to pick up a few extra and very interesting side projects along the way.
Y’know… to fill my spare time.
Just taking stock now, and it looks like my son has gone away for the week to hang out with some visiting German kids…
I’m thinking about getting an account on MediaTemple’s GridService: http://www.mediatemple.net/webhosting/gs/
As far as I can fathom, it’s a burstable VPS, but they can move the virtual machines between physical machines (instantly). So if your site gets slashdotted, your virtual machine might get temporarily moved to a physical machine all of its own (or one that’s shared with a small number of sites). When traffic returns to a more normal level, it’ll be moved back to a machine that’s shared with more people.
I’m not a customer (or employee) so I can’t vouch for their tech support etc., but it looks like a technically good solution – and they’re the only people offering such a service for only $20/month.
If you try them, let me know how you get on.