Thursday , March 28 2024

The Flood and Bloghosts

As our writers know, I have been very pleased and even proud of our progress as a site, developing a very steady and dependable readership of about 10,000 people in the course of our first year-and-a-half.

Part of that success has been predicated upon technical know-how. As I learned in my years of mobile and club DJing, nothing kills a party more quickly than equipment problems, and the fact that I haven’t even had to think about our site hosting company, Bloghosts, since we moved to them several months ago is the best possible result.

Not even thinking about your hosting company means nothing is happening to interrupt the flow of information from your site out to the people who may be interested in partaking of that flow. It means the “how” is talking care of itself, and all we have to worry about is the “what.” This is gold.

I don’t even really know how this stuff works: I just know I enter words and symbols and numbers into our Movable Type software and it comes out on the other end for the all the world (well, all the world with an Internet connection) to see.

So, here we were, plugging away, gradually inching our upward toward the magical 10,000 per day mark, tantalizingly close to adding that sweet fifth digit when Janet Jackson popped out of her wardrobe Sunday night around 8:30 and the nation couldn’t believe its eyes and sought confirmation on the Internet.

As I said here, after the halftime show, I ran downstairs to check in on the site – as I habitually, perhaps obsessively, do on a regular basis – and rather than the usual 300 or 400 hundred visitors an hour we would normally be getting at that time, we were getting 5,000 an hour. We ended up with about 23,000 Sunday and had that many on Monday by 7AM – it continued thoughout the day, rising to 10-, then 12-, then 14-, then 20-thousand per hour until we reached 250,000 on Monday.

After sending a brief note to Bloghosts – our pal Jace to be specific – Sunday night to please keep an eye on things as the traffic was deluging, nothing whatsoever happened to make me think about our hosting company again throughout Monday’s insanity, Tuesday’s 100,000 visitors, or Wednesday’s 90,000: no collapses, no glitches, no slowdowns, nothing but smooth sailing and a shitload of traffic breezing through.

For all I know, Jace had a team of bare-chested, perspiring engineers hosing down the server so it wouldn’t melt, or he had it packed in dry ice, or a host of sheperds watching over it by night – I don’t know – but I do know he did whatever he had to do to keep us up and running and that it was only after the fact that he mentioned that we had used more bandwidth in ONE DAY Monday than we had used in the previous month.

Now THAT is a hosting company – consider this the highest possible recommendation.

About Eric Olsen

Career media professional and serial entrepreneur Eric Olsen flung himself into the paranormal world in 2012, creating the America's Most Haunted brand and co-authoring the award-winning America's Most Haunted book, published by Berkley/Penguin in Sept, 2014. Olsen is co-host of the nationally syndicated broadcast and Internet radio talk show After Hours AM; his entertaining and informative America's Most Haunted website and social media outlets are must-reads: Twitter@amhaunted, Facebook.com/amhaunted, Pinterest America's Most Haunted. Olsen is also guitarist/singer for popular and wildly eclectic Cleveland cover band The Props.

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