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Add comment October 30th, 2006
Archive for October 30th, 2006
Flickrbabes, gone
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By now, you probably noticed that the site disappeared since last thursday, but it’s back again. I got a lot of messages from people asking what’s going on. I’m sorry I didn’t answer. It’s just that work has kept me too busy these days.
So, what’s going on? Flickrbabes was hosted by dreamhost, pretty good, pretty cheap. Unfortunately, it puts limits to their users’ sites. Basically, this site was using too many resources from the server, so they decided it was a good idea to just deactivate the site. This happened last thursday, and I had no notification about what happened, or why they decided to do this. They just notified me about this issue, when I wrote them an email. It may be just me, but I think it’s common sense to (at least) notify the site’s owner about what’s going on.
So, they told me one of the scripts of this blog was using too many resources. The most simple solution for me was to deactivate all of the blog’s plugins. After doing that, they’d put the site back up. The thing is, I did on friday night, and send them an email notifying that I did the requested changes. But again, there was no answer until today.
As this issue was taking to long to get solved, I decided to switch hosts. Flickrbabes is now hosted at mediatemple. Of course, my hosting costs increased, and considering I’m still maintaining some sites at dreamhost (like fbrevolution), I’m paying actually 3 times what I used to pay (sort of).
Usually shared hosting is fine with any site, until it either gets too popular (has a lot of traffic) or uses a lot of resources (like a forum). When that happens, the hosting company will usually close your account or upgrade to a dedicated server. Don’t get me wrong, dreamhost is a good hosting company, but this is what happens if you pay so little for hosting.
I’ll probably will have to switch to a dedicated (or virtual dedicated) server one of these days. I’ll also have to check flickrbabes code to see if I can improve its performance, hoping that the customized plugin I did for it isn’t the cause of the excesive use of resources. The thing is, I keep this site for fun, I don’t make any profit from it, and I won’t, because if I put ads or anything to make money, flickr will block my site, and also because all of these photos are the work of other photographers, so I don’t see why should I profit from that. The fact that I do have a job 
means that this site isn’t one of my main priorities. So, if it starts causing too much trouble, or I have to spend to much money on it, I’ll just have to close it. So far, I don’t think that’s going to happen, but who knows.
By the way, tomorrow we celebrate one year of flickrbabes! It existed from way before (I think July or August 2005), but a lot of posts were deleted by blogger somehow, a long long time ago.
4 comments October 30th, 2006
