27
Oct, 2011

How to check if your website is down for other people or just you

blog post by Mack

Uh, is this thing on?

“My website’s down. What’s wrong? Is it just me?” downforeveryoneorjustme.com

Or maybe, you know, you’re just watching Netflix one evening, and right when you’re in the last five seconds of a football game — about to find out whether or not the Dillon Panthers won the Texas state championship — it just stops. And you’re saying, “HEY! Did they win or lose?!” followed by “HEY! Is Netflix not working for everyone or just me?” followed by “Am I cursed? Or is everyone doomed?” followed by your husband saying, “You’re so dramatic! It’s just a television show,” followed by your anger.

Maybe you’ve been there before. Maybe you’ve called your mom in the middle of the night to make her check on her computer. (I plead the 5th.) Maybe you’ve pulled a blanket over your face in hopes it’d fix itself. Maybe you’ve called me.

Possible and real life reasons your site may appear to be down to you

  • the Internet is down in your current location
  • the website is stuck in the computer’s cache
  • you’re in a fancy office building that has a network server; it may be blocked or stuck in the server’s cache of sorts
  • your website hosting‘s down, for real, like seriously, get that fixed

You can find out whether or not you should direct your anger at your Internet service provider or at Netflix. And you won’t have to call your mom, or your cousin, or some estranged friend you haven’t spoken to in years (but maybe you should call them anyway, at a decent hour).

This website may not tell me how an episode of my favorite television show ended, but it will answer the main question:

“Is it just me, or…?”

http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com

Use it. It’s smart. And my mom really likes it. She sleeps better at night now.

28
Jun, 2011

.com, .org, .whateveryouwant, .comingsoontotheinternet

blog post by Sam

Come July 2012 we could have a website at heystac.heystac and not use the traditional ‘.com’ or ‘.org’ — well, if we had a lot of extra cash to kick around. Have an extra $185,000 bucks I can borrow? That’s what it’ll cost to just apply for a new domain ending to exist (and be available for use by others).

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, voted a week ago to expand the limited number of 22 top-level domain endings with a new rule: People can apply to ICANN to register almost any word in any language as a domain ending.

CNN.com has a great article explaining its changes, benefits and challenges.

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07
Apr, 2011

Virtualization Is The Future Of Hosting

blog post by Sam

We’ve made the switch to virtual servers, and here’s why. When we first started off hosting and designing websites we were using shared hosting with a few of our bigger clients and sites. We have a good working relationship with our host, Frozen Web Host, so we weren’t worried about being packed onto an overstuffed server.

When we began to put out about 10-20 websites a week we made the switch to GoDaddy for some of our shared hosting needs to keep costs to a minimum for our clients. This was one of our biggest mistakes, as after the switch, on several sites, we began noticing extremely poor performance. A number of our websites would be slow to load, or sometimes they wouldn’t load at all and would time out. GoDaddy wasn’t living up to its promises, so we fired them and found a better solution.

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