Daily readers of our website will know that we’ve been having some…um…issues lately with the technology that runs this fine publication.
Visitors have encountered the deadly “Unable to make a database connection” notification instead of the day’s news, at times.
We moved servers several months ago when our longtime hosting partner in Oswego shut down most of its business. We’re hosted — for the moment — with a national firm whose name you might recognize. They’re the ones that buy Super Bowl ads featuring busty young women.
We’ve done business with them for years. They’ve been our web domain registrar, handling the domain duties for us and our 60-or-so web hosting clients.
Recently, we were hit by a trojan horse attack — meaning, a rogue program got onto our server somehow and damaged our files.
Our Fred Reed worked countless hours rebuilding us. Now, we’re secure but something else is going wrong. It’s not a virus or anything like that. But something is using all of the available memory in our server at odd times. Doing so shuts us down for short but very frustrating periods.
We’re working on it, but it’s a pretty complex problem.
We’re trying to avoid moving to another server company. Moving from one company to another is not like moving from one house to another. It’s like moving the entire house from one place to another. It’s a very long, complex and painful process.
So, if you get the “database error” screen or the site takes impossibly long to load, understand that we’re probably aware of it (we’ve got a service that lets us know by cell phone and e-mail when there’s a problem) and we’re working on it.
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