I’ll admit it…I’m embarrassed that my first blog post in over 6 months is to explain a site outage. I throw myself on the mercy of the court, beg your forgiveness and vow to do better. Now, on to our feature presentation.

So, What Happened?

As many of you no doubt noticed, CPO went offline yesterday somewhere between 12:00 and 1:00 pm PST. It came back to life this morning around 4:30 am. First, I wish to apologize to all loyal CPO users for this inconvenience. I know how earth shattering it can be to rely upon a web service and then one day find out it’s GONE! So, I’m very sorry this outage occurred and I will explore ways to keep this from happening in the future.

Most of you will know this already but I’ll say it anyhow…No data was lost – none, zero, zilch. The database is intact and functioning fine. One of my other web properties, StuffSafe.com , was picked up by Lifehacker on Tuesday afternoon and traffic has spiked through the roof since then. I’m working with my hosting company to determine the exact cause of the outage but my suspicion is that there were just too many simultaneous authentication requests to the database server attached to my cheap-ass hosting account.

“Wait!”, you say. “What does StuffSafe have to do with a CPO outage?”

Well, both sites (and a few others) are hosted on the same account so the traffic spike to StuffSafe brought down everything. (Gasp from the audience and then…pin drop silence.)

“Hmmm, not very good infrastructure planning is it, Jeff.”

Yes, you would be right about that – given unlimited resources or at least a profitable business model, neither of which CPO has right now. What CPO does have in the way of resources is time and the good will of its users, but not cash.

“Ok, enough excuses. How will you keep this from happening in the future?”

I have one idea. Move StuffSafe.com to its own cheap-ass hosting account and if it spikes again, at least it won’t bring down everything else. But consider this, StuffSafe has averaged less than 500 page views per day for almost 2 years. CPO averages about 5,000 page views per day. My other 3 sites combined barely even register since I’m not actively promoting them right now. On a typical day, my hosting account deals with around 5,500 page views which is not taxing in the least.

Short of offloading a couple of sites to other hosting accounts, I’m not sure what else can be done at this point. I’m open to suggestions if some of you have dealt with this problem before – specifically, large traffic spikes on cheap hosting accounts coupled with the inability to afford a more robust infrastructure.

Again, I apologize for the downtime and the heart failure. Thanks for reading.

Jeff