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.