I am aware of the issues that have been plaguing the site over the past few days, and I apologise for them. They’re due to the fact that the shared server Virtual Bloke is hosted on had suffered hardware failure and needed to be moved temporarily to another server, before finally being moved (sometime in w/c June 12th, or so I’m told) to a brand new server. That resulted in a day of the site looking like this:
It has also resulted in some slowness to load. Now, with a bit of luck, that won’t impact you at all, my dear readers. I have the site minified and cached, and most of it is served up through a CDN, so as outside observers you should be seeing no difference in site load times, as it’s all being handled through cached files and the external CDN service.
However, it’s a different matter for me. Every single page load takes approximately a minute and a half for me, and that’s assuming it doesn’t time out. In fact, everything is taking a minute and a half for me on this site right now, from accessing my dashboard, approving comments, replying to comments, making new posts (which is why I’ll be taking a copy of this one before I hit ‘publish’) etc. It’s like being back in the days of 56k dialup, and it’s making me want to tear my hair out in frustration.
We’ve all had those times when entire days (sometimes entire weekends) have been spent in trying to fix problems with our computers, so I hope you can understand where I’m coming from. I want to blog, but right now I can’t. Just waiting for one image that I’ve uploaded to load in my browser so I can paste it into a post is going to take one and a half minutes, and on average I put about five to eight images into each post. Yeah, I’m going to spare myself the screaming on that one. The only other way I can do it is via Flickr: uploading the images there and then linking them into a post here, and I’d rather not spam my Flickr followers with as many views of a single outfit as I do in a blog post dedicated to that outfit.
My webhost is aware of the problems with the site, and they’re working on it. But, as it’s a shared server, obviously I’m not going to be the only one having issues. I’m in a queue to get this fixed, and I’ve no idea how far down the queue I am. At least I don’t have to listen to tinny muzak while I wait, nor spend a week’s wage on paying to be put on hold :p
In short: be prepared for a few more mostly-text posts and fewer image-heavy posts over the next, well, I guess week or so. If it lasts any longer than that, I’ll be putting in enough support tickets with my webhost to annoy them into fixing it. And, again, be prepared for more site downtime/slowness around the week of June 12th. I’ll try and give some advance notice of that, as soon as I get a date and time for the server move.