Museum of Hoaxes is Moving

The Museum of Hoaxes will soon be moving to a new home at a different web hosting company (pMachine hosting). This may cause a slight disruption in service (fewer posts) over the following week as I make the switch. At the very least it might mean that the site will temporarily be at a new url (one of those urls that are just a string of numbers) until the internet domain name servers reassign museumofhoaxes.com to the new web host.

The reason for the move is that over the past few days all of the server-intensive functions of the site (such as being able to post and edit entries) froze up, apparently because of increased traffic. I'm not sure what the cause of the traffic spike was. Looking at my referrer logs it seems that the vast majority of the traffic is coming from the google and yahoo search engines.

Anyway, the server couldn't handle the load... or rather my web host restricted the amount of server queries my site could make, so that my site wouldn't hog the server's cpu... which meant I suddenly was having trouble posting entries. It all gets a bit technical. The long and short of it is that the site has evidently outgrown the server it was on, so it's time to move to something a bit more robust.

I'll keep everyone posted about how the move is going.

Miscellaneous

Posted on Sun Jan 23, 2005


Comments

This article might be the source of your extra traffic.
Posted by Jane  on  Sun Jan 23, 2005  at  11:56 AM
Hmm. That article is at least four years old. I remember when Martha first wrote it. She contacted me. Encarta must periodically recycle old stuff. Anyway, I noticed a lot of hits coming from that today, but the traffic spike began much earlier, on Thursday.

Anyway, whatever the source of the traffic, I need a server that won't go belly up whenever traffic increases, especially since April Fool's Day is coming up, which always causes a major traffic spike at this site.
Posted by The Curator  in  San Diego  on  Sun Jan 23, 2005  at  12:02 PM
Was it something I said?
Posted by Hairy Houdini  on  Sun Jan 23, 2005  at  01:00 PM
I feel a disturbance in the force...
Posted by Nick  on  Sun Jan 23, 2005  at  01:08 PM
I actually think that article Jane mentions is how I find your site, and that was only a couple months ago.
Posted by James D  on  Sun Jan 23, 2005  at  01:59 PM
Help us, Alex Ben Kenobi... You're my only hoax.
Posted by Hairy Houdini  on  Sun Jan 23, 2005  at  01:59 PM
...as if a thousand hoaxes cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
Posted by The Curator  in  San Diego  on  Sun Jan 23, 2005  at  02:24 PM
Promise you'll come back!!!! :ahhh:
I'd be so sad without you!
Posted by Glamcat  on  Sun Jan 23, 2005  at  04:24 PM
From running my own websites, Google searches only increase for two reasons:

1. a. The algorithm has changed.
1. b. The math in it has changed.

They did recently do a major revision; that could be it. Or, the spidering system has picked up more links to your site. 1.a. would explain a large, sustained spike froma sudden origin. 1.b. would explain a slightly less obvious spike.

2. Plain old word of mouth. More folks are talking.

Buddy? People pay good money (millions) to make 1.a. and 1.b. happen.

Congrats. Enjoy it. Adjust your advertising guidelines.
Posted by Google = word of mouth  on  Sun Jan 23, 2005  at  10:51 PM
Three phrases should be among the most common in our daily usage. They are: Thank you, I am grateful and I appreciate.
Posted by penis size  on  Wed Nov 23, 2005  at  06:30 PM
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