Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Desperately Seeking Vlad

For those of you who have been wondering: Yes, Vlad Tepes is having problems with his site. Depending on where you are in the world, you may get an Apache server message instead of Vlad Tepes when you click the above link.

Vlad’s traffic has increased to the point where his provider persuaded him to upgrade to a VPN (for both blog and video service), a much more expensive option. This involved moving to a new server, which meant a new IP address. As a result, all the changes had to propagate to all the different DNS (Domain Name Servers).

Vlad’s site came back up after a while, but then they had to “flush the DNS” (I think that was the term; I have no idea what it means). Since then Vlad has been unavailable in much of the world.

Here’s how Vlad explained the upgrade process:
When my sites — Vlad (the blog) and bankoran.com (the video site) — started to get popular, the traffic generated ‘processes’. When there are more than 25 processes, it gets shut down, as it’s too large a drain on the resources of a shared account, and therefore is unfair to all the other people who have web pages, email, etc. on the same physical server.

With the VPN [virtual private network] they recommended, I get unlimited processes and bandwidth. Which means I can accommodate as many users as care to view my site. Also, when someone leaves a comment on a popular thread and the page auto-emails everyone else in the thread, it won’t shut down vladtepesblog.com.

Presumably it means I can post more videos to bankoran with easier embedding to other sites, and so on.

Vlad told me earler this evening, “I was on the phone all day with tech support before I came to work. I was so ticked off at their brutal major incompetence.”

In other words, his fans must be patient for a while longer. This is not a malicious outage; it is technical trouble.

7 comments:

Dymphna said...

I'll bet his tecchies are Blooger rejects...or is this a Canadian deal? Two hosers sharing a laptop?

I know, I know. Canada is better because they're not victims of the American banking/poliltical scam. They never bought into the idea that everyone in the underclass deserved a house.

Besides, as Ezra Klein pointed out, they have ethical oil while we have the apocalyptic Anti-Oil himself -- Obama.

I'm sick of our "new&improved" Blooger. Sounds like he has the same scenario.

Franklin said...

And enemies can bombard your site and shut it down automatically.

philip.zhao said...

Could be Islamic cyber attack known as the Arab Autumn !

Zenster said...

philip.zhao: Could be Islamic cyber attack known as the Arab Autumn !

I discussed all of this jihad nonsense with an Air Force veteran the other day. By his lights, an Arab Autumn should be the least of Muslim worries.

He felt that Islam would be well-advised to devote its entire attention to Winter … in its nuclear form.

Pierre said...

Vlad, keep up the good work. Looking forward to your site being back up.

http://islamsfatalflaw.blogspot.com/

Unknown said...

More likely, he's upgraded from shared hosting to a VPS (Virtual Private Server), not a VPN.

Baron Bodissey said...

pz3 --

Yeah, you're probably right. I should have paid closer attention to what he said. VPS sounds more like it.