Written on January 22, 2005 (5 WE).
Forever glorious be your names, O wise daughters and sons of Logos and Axioma, for they prove that the humans are interconnected in a global web!
Many, I mean many of you noticed severe problems with SALIU.COM beginning 2004. The web site went down many times, sometimes for long hours, even days. One of the worst incidents occurred in September of 2004. When people wanted to visit my web site, they were met by a dreadful message: Account suspended!!! As if I hadn't paid my dues! In fact, my payment was getting rotten in a mailbox at the web hosting company. The most severe and damaging issues were related to the FTP downloads site. Very many visitors were turned down in their desire to download some of the greatest freeware in the world. Worst, the FTP site went down completely quite a few times. At moments, I, the owner, was not allowed to access it!
I had subscribed to a new company to host my web site in March of 2003. PersonalSites.org was recommended to me by somebody who happened to write a computer program hosted at my free FTP Download. I hadn't known anything about the web host. But the price was right. The host also offered a plethora of features at no extra cost. My package included a pretty big bandwidth: 20 gigabytes per month! Downloading my freeware takes up a large bandwidth. Things went nicely for a while. Then I realized the web host was, actually a one-man show. The owner and administrator was a young man. I had no problem with that. But after less than one year, he threatened to shut down the shop, or increase the prices across the board. I accepted the price increase. Then he began to change things more often than weather changes. There was no change without some problem. We experienced some serious problems and big headaches.
To make it short, December 2004 and January 2004 represented my worst Internet experience. I received quite a few emails from would-be visitors or old-timers. Some messages were angry. I would have been angry, too. The search engines referred me to a site, only to find out it did not exist! People found out that I also had some mirror sites. That's how some got my contact info.
On January 19 (or 18?) my entire web site went down. No more SALIU.COM! I don't go online each and every day. I am plenty busy, especially with the process of making all my software entirely mathematical. Call it the total mathematicalization of Ion Saliu's software. I checked my site in response to an email. I couldn't get there, no matter what I tried. I tried all the administrative tools in the hands of a site administrator. Nothing worked. I checked with the technical support staff. I was shocked to find out that they had changed the so-called server names without notice! They had also consolidated two web servers in one. The server hosting my site was involved in the process. I went to the registrar of my domain name (GoDaddy). I updated my servernames. It takes a while for the change to take effect (the process is called propagation). I did it before, but it took a very short time for the propagation. This time — it was an eternity. It is now January 39, and my website is still offline!
Every time my renewal payment was due, my web site was under the threat of being shut down. Meanwhile, my checks were fading out in a mailbox. Was the kid mocking me? Perhaps… He knew what a hassle moving from one web host to another is, especially with a site as big and complex as mine. Perhaps the kid-owner didn't want me as a customer any more. Beginning 2003, my website drove a big Internet traffic, an inconvenience for a small-time web hosting service. Was he paid by others to cause serious problems to my web site? Nothing could and should be ruled out. My web site went down far too frequently, starting the second half of 2004. In the latter stages, there was no week without several stoppages of service.
The FTP facility was the most affected. I received numerous complaints from visitors. They were unable to download my sought-after freeware. They even were asked for authorization. I never installed any barriers at my SOFTWARE downloads site. Everybody was free to download without being asked for a name or password. It's not a surprise, because my web site is under constant hack-attack. There are some bastards who believe they are in the army of Valor et Gloria. They are at war with me till the end of their pathetic lives. Did you know that some of them paid to have my web site included in the worst kind of porno sites — incest sites? I received thousands of visitors from such sites! Their rationale was that the search engines would penalize the rankings of my web pages because of inclusion in web sites with degrading content. My web site had such inclusions for about a month. That didn't affect the rankings of my web pages. The search engines refer an increasing number of visitors to my site from month to month. The inclusion in “those” sites must have been very expensive. The “sponsorship” was dropped the following month.
While seeing myself in the screen of the monitor, I saw how all my hairs were falling down like the snowflakes of this winter storm that hit the North-eastern United States. I made up my mind quickly. I open a web hosting account with another company. Actually, it is the same one that acts as the registrar of my domain: GODADDY.COM. They look like a company with a lot more resources. After all, they are the number one domain registrar in the world. Surprisingly, I got a deal even better than what I paid to the one-man gang. I paid for one year. The data transfer is really huge: 100 GB per month data transfer. Yes, that's one hundred gigs per month in bandwidth! Downloading should be much easier from now on. I can only hope that everything will work better this time. Changing web hosting is a brutal pain in the ass, O magistrates of symmetrical judgment!
Right now, I started the transfer of my software titles to the new server. I decided to make some changes as well. Some old programs will no longer be available. They were superseded by more potent versions.
There is also a forum with a lot of my stuff, plus lottery contributions from others: Forums for Lotto, Lottery, Gambling, Software, Systems.
• Be mindful of this undeniable rule of life. Hate is much more energy-intense than any other form of emotion. We face it every step of the way in our daily lives. My haters are much more energetic than those who deal with me normally. It is valid also as far as my free software is concerned. If they had it their way, the haters would rate my software as the worst possible — an infinite number of times. Fortunately, sanity always prevails, albeit by the longest way home. So, intense haters cannot vote many times against something they hate. Now, is it a whole lot to ask in return for something great I offer for free? Perhaps you find a moment to spare and vote for my freeware. Just be you when you vote. I am I when I keep my emotions under control. If I had created this thing, how would I rate it? I've seen many things, but how would I coolly rate this thing?
If all fails, be patient, will you? I'll fall back on my feet, like a cat. Ain't I a Tiger, according to the Chinese horoscope?
Addendum, February & November 2005
Everything works okay at this point. I haven't received any downtime complaint. It seems that SALIU.COM is up and running all the time. The same is true as far as the download site goes. Everything is there — the way it is supposed to be.
Surprisingly, the number of referrals by the search engines has grown incredibly higher after the change in the web hosting. The referrals were monitored for a 30-day period in January 2005 and February 2005. The list breaks down the search engines by country, region, domain, etc. WWW.Google.com alone recorded over 120,000 referrals; www.google.ca had 16,181 referrals; beta.search.msn.com registered 1,999 referrals, while search.msn.com had 15,387 referrals, etc. Total referrals by all search engines: a whopping 283,378. Total referrals, including by pages at this site, exceed one million per month. The number of hits per month (not a significant parameter) grows towards ten million.
See a most comprehensive list of the search engines that referred visitors to SALIU.COM in January-February 2005. The list is broken down into countries, regions, domains, etc.
• In November 2005, my web hosting plan has been greatly enhanced at no extra cost to me. I can hardly imagine outgrowing my webhosting package ever!
+ Increased Disk Space from 2,000 MB to 10,000 MB
+ Increased Bandwidth from 100 GB to 500 GB
+ Increased Email Accounts from 500 to 1,000
+ Increased your Database MySQL from 10 to 25
