A couple of days ago the business end of Jer’s Software Hut went down. I got the message “Your bandwidth limit has been exceeded. Please contact your system administrator as soon as possible.” It turns out that for Liverack, my hosting provider, “as soon as possible” translates to “never”, even when you’re trying to give them more money. As I have mentioned elsewhere, I don’t think their hearts are in the business anymore. In the past they had been very responsive, and I wondered how they could have a business that charged so little and maintain that level of service. I guess I got my answer.
Is there a silver lining to this cloud? is my bandwidth limit getting blown more and more quickly an indication of success? Not… so much. While the rest of the Web clamors for Google’s attention, the Goog is loving me to death, downloading several times the entire site’s worth of data each month. This does not include the application download, which is already on another server.
So jerssoftwarehut.com/ will be moving soon, to a server maintained by a Friend of the Hut. I tried to ask Google how I could help them spider the site more efficiently (it costs them also), but got no response. My question was such an outlier on the forum I thought it might get some notice by insiders.
Not being able spend my days combatting spammers on the Jer’s Novel Writer forums, I suddenly had a lot of extra time on my hands. Good timing for it, as I wanted to get a new release up, even if most people won’t hear about it until the hutsite comes back to life. I retired to the Secret Lab, located on an island of stone on a river of magma, drifting through the network of grand, eerily-lit caverns deep beneath this quiet Prague neighborhood, and prepared a release. When all was ready I called to my misshapen assistant, “Raise the software to the server!” “Yes, master!” he called as he shuffled to a giant switch mounted on a stalagmite and threw it in a shower of blue sparks.
We waited.
And waited.
You see, The Hut’s Internet provider also imposes a bandwidth limit. When you reach this limit, the connection continues to work, just very, very, slowly. Remember dialup? I do now.
Too many ones, too many zeroes. The file will be up before you are able to read this.
Come Wednesday all will be well again, and I won’t have the need to do the same large downloads I did this month to get my mini set up. Also I’ll use lower-bitrate Internet radio options. Soon everything will be hunky-dory, and the ones and zeroes shall flow again.
