Oops!

Hey, there, Javabird fans.  We apologize for the recent website crash we experienced.  It was one of those good news, bad news things.  On the plus side, it turned out our Web Hosting plan only granted us a certain amount of memory and we’d run out.  That means the combination of our site content and site traffic had finally overgrown our allotted server space.  It’s basically a sign we’ve been growing—it’s a little like putting your pants on in the morning and you suddenly realize you can’t button them anymore. It’s good in you get to go shopping for a new set of pants, but not so good if you don’t have another set of pants to wear in the meantime.

My Heart! My Heart!

As someone still relatively new to blogging, I have to tell you nothing makes the old ticker start pounding faster that an error message telling me my site is unavailable.  Unavailable?!!!  And in this case, it was worse:  The message Yahoo put up made it sound more like our site has just been shut down by the CIA and anyone trying to access it was about to added to the no-fly list.

Sorry!  Warning! Caution! Stop!

You do not have permission to access this location.  All violators will severely scolded by the internet traffic police.  You are advised to turn around and wipe your browser history immediately.  Failure to heed this warning will result in significant peril, a bad headache and a visit from the boogey man.

Oh, We’re Sorry

Here’s how my conversation went down with Yahoo’s Customer Service:

Yahoo: As a WordPress blog hosted by Yahoo, your site is database driven.  Now, since Javabird’s original hosting plan had only so much memory, when it ran out the database was not able to build your pages—thus, the error message received was a database error rather than a server error.

Me: Yeah, that’s great, but I spent the better part of an hour last night updating my plan with another of your associates.  We supposedly fixed this same issue.  After we upgraded, it seemed to work fine.

Yahoo: Yes, I see that, but due to the configuration of the teliohelimetric co-efficiency rate of the concentric baloney factor, our Speed Racer Automatic Server Expansion Generator didn’t expand your allotted memory space automatically…you know, like it was supposed to.  That means your currently limping along at sub-light speed.  Don’t worry, we’ll put our engineer, Mr. Scott, on the problem and as soon as he’s done reading the latest copy of Quantum Derivative Mechanics he’ll get right on that.

Me: Oh, that’s swell, but here’s my question: If I was about to run out of disk space couldn’t you have sent me an email to upgrade last week?  You know, before my site crashed and burned like the Challenger space shuttle mission?

Yahoo: And I personally would have done that, Sir, if only the tangential inference correlating to the space continuum hadn’t been affected by  radiation emanating from the fallout at the failing Japanese nuclear reactors.

Me: So you’re blaming this on Japan?  Don’t they have enough to worry about without getting blamed for this foul up?

Yahoo: Sorry, sir.  You’re right.  Would you believe our data center was infested by a phalanx of weasels?

Me: Not so much.

Yahoo: How about this, then:  We had to battle an invasion of nanobots from the planet Zircon.

Me: I thought Zircon was a mineral.

Yahoo: Oh…well…let’s see…the Zircon you find here on earth is like Kryptonite to the people of from the home planet.  In fact, that’s how we beat the nanabots.

Me: You’re making this up.

Yahoo: You’re right…sorry again, sir.  Would you believe it was Joe?

Me: Joe?  Whose Joe and what’d he do?

Yahoo: He’s the night janitor.  His girlfriend sent him a “Dear John” text and he got so mad he threw a bottle of industrial strength cleaner across the room.  Unfortunately, it hit LM2543.

Me: Okay, I’m interested…what’s LM2543?

Yahoo: That would be the last remains of the server we used to store your data on.

Me: WHAT?!!!

We Hope You Come Back

Just for the record, we did upgrade our hosting plan to the “unlimited” package so theoretically we should not run into this problem again.  However, having just got off the phone with customer service associate number three, I’ve learned unlimited isn’t really unlimited in that they still assign you a certain space on the server.  This means, you can run out and if you do they’ll have to manually increase it.  Egads, man, say it isn’t so.  I don’t think my ticker can take it.

By Bob Anderson

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