Lou's Blog

There's not been much time in my life for ComicCritique.Com these past few weeks, and given the relative silence from my fellow CCdC contributors things have been the same with them. It's normal; we're all adults with day jobs. But I finally have time and space to do some much-needed posting, and crash! The hosting provider appears to be having a whole host of problems. Near as I can tell, the server on which CCdC lives has been down for a good five hours or so. I consider myself a good user in that I check the hosting provider's "network news" messages before calling. They're actually pretty good about posting messages that give an idea of what's going on and naming the problem servers. On those occasions I do call, I'm greeted with a help desk person who at least understands my concern, and they say as nice as humanly possible, "It'll be up when it's up." So I minimize my attempts to contact them during such times and keep a steady "ping www.comiccritique.com" running in a window. I'll call later and get an in-person (in-voice) status, just because it makes me feel better to know there's somebody aware of and working on my tech issue.

I have more than once done exhaustive research into new hosting providers, and it appears that they're all about the same. Unless I care to host my own server (I don't, at least not now), there's not much I can do about availability and up-time. This company has done pretty well by me, and I'd give them a B or a B+. Our longest outage was maybe three months ago. We were down basically from Friday morning through Monday morning. I wasn't amused, and that was the incident that really sent me hunting for a replacement provider. I just couldn't find one --- for what I can afford --- that seemed to be any better than what I'm using. So here we are. One day, when CCdC generates some cash flow, I'll make an upgrade a priority, even if it means running some things from the basement server room at Ehlvee Manor.

Stay tuned...