A Note On Comments
CQ commenters have noticed a large number of errors when trying to submit comments. I get the same errors when I try to comment -- and we're working on a permanent solution. The truth is that we've become too successful in building traffic and a large community to work through normal, low-cost hosting services, and I need to make other arrangements. I've been trying for months to make enough back-end changes to keep costs down, but I have to acknowledge that success in this industry requires a better allocation of resources.
It will take a few days to implement the necessary changes. In the meantime, please don't reload your comment when you get an error message -- in almost every case, the comment has been received. For new commenters, I have to approve your first entry in order to get past the spam protections we have here, and I'm pretty good about doing so within a short period of time.
In no time, we will have the changes made and the server responses should improve measurably. Thanks for your patience in the meantime.
Addendum: I mentioned my dissatisfaction with my previous hosting service in an earlier post. I didn't name them because they had been helpful to me in the past. This week, I exchanged e-mails with the service's owner, who could not have been more gracious and apologetic for the problems I experienced. She has offered some key support for the future, and it is much appreciated.
Posted by Ed Morrissey on May 18, 2007 10:43 AM | Comments (11) | TrackBacks (0)
Comments (11)
Posted by swabjockey05 | May 18, 2007 11:56 AM
Thanks Captain. Your blog is still the best one in town. Keep it up!
Swabbie
Posted by Don Singleton | May 18, 2007 12:41 PM
If you need to change your host, a few days before the move have the old host set your DNS record's :expires time" (also called TTL - time to live) to a small number (less than one hour), then once the move has been done you can reset to a normal value. This will prevent several days where some visitors see the new site and others see the old site
Posted by Don Singleton | May 18, 2007 12:44 PM
If you need to change your host, a few days before the move have the old host set your DNS record's :expires time" (also called TTL - time to live) to a small number (less than one hour), then once the move has been done you can reset to a normal value. This will prevent several days where some visitors see the new site and others see the old site
Posted by Cindi | May 18, 2007 1:53 PM
Thank you for attending to this problem. I appreciate the blog and the discourse available here, even when we disagree.
Best to the FM.
Posted by ck | May 18, 2007 9:05 PM
Have you thought about new software? I understand high traffic with small/cheap hosting problems has its own set of problems, but the software used doesn't seem to be helping the cause either -
Posted by cthulhu | May 18, 2007 10:12 PM
Thinking about the excitement around the immigration bill, your change of employment, the web hosting situation, and radio shows........
...my thoughts are on the FM. Our thoughts and prayers continue, is she doing well?
Posted by jeff | May 18, 2007 11:08 PM
If I may be so bold, the problems go beyond your hosting service.
1) You are using Movable Type, which to be blunt, just plain sucks when compared to Wordpress.
2) Your page load time suffers from a number of unreliable third party service calls, and/or just a large number of calls such as google analytics, blogrolling, zedo, etc.
Running a high traffic blog is hard work but lot's of people and organizations do it.
Posted by Jeff | May 19, 2007 8:56 AM
btw, I also noticed that you are loading technorati and sitemeter services in you page.
Technorati has been and will probably always be one of the most poorly performing web services.
Sitemeter in recent months started sending specificclick cookies from Specific Media, which is one reason why their service has become so slow. More onerously, Specific Media is a spam company so in essence you are sending cookies through your block for the purposes of spam. Unknowing for sure as Sitemeter hasn't exactly broadcast that they are working with Specific Media.
If you google "sitemeter specific media" you will get all the details on this, most of the information coming to light in just the last few weeks.
Posted by jeff | May 19, 2007 9:09 AM
You are also loading Sitemeter code in your page. It has become known in recent weeks that Sitemeter hooked up with a company called Specific Media, a spammer. They are delivering up to 9 specificclick cookies to every visitor that loads your page, and the purpose is not to give you better stats.
Google "sitemeter specific media" to learn about the details, including the effects that this has been having on performance of sitemeter equipped sites.
Posted by Captain Ed | May 19, 2007 9:27 AM
Jeff,
The problem is not in the page load. It's in the scripting and database functions. It only hangs when items are added or modified in the database.
Posted by jeff | May 19, 2007 9:56 AM
sorry for the double comment... the first attempt seemed to stall and crashed Firefox so I rewrote it.