I’m trying to get some idea of numbers for the September Meet Up. If you’re coming please could you visit our contact page and send me an email via the form, with the Meet Up subject selected. That includes all the people who are staying in the hotel and everyone who isn’t. It’s everyone really. If you could do it right away I’d really appreciate it.

Thanks

Rich

As of sometime this morning, musicalmousemat.com is offline. I didn’t take it down, we exceeded our monthly bandwidth for that hosting account, which isn’t something I ever expected to happen. To be honest, in the decade or more that I’ve been building and running various websites I have never seen one exceed the monthly bandwidth limit.

It turns out that our store is using over 100GB per month of data. That’s far more than even simplysyndicated.com and this site runs all our RSS feeds! That uses a lot of data. After checking the logs it shows that the 100GB was used by under 1000 people. That means that our store system, Magento, uses an obscene amount of data to work.

There isn’t much I can do about the existing store hosting account. It really is over its limit and won’t come back on line until the end of this month. Obviously that’s not very good so I’ve set up a new hosting account with a different provider and am now in the process of moving things over. This can take time, as I write this I’m waiting for the domain name to change over to the new account before I can even start trying to transfer things.

With any luck I’ll be able to get things moved and back up and running as they were yesterday. If things go well all user accounts and purchases will be available.

The worst case senario is that I can’t transfer anything and I have to start again from scratch. If that’s the case please don’t worry about any files that you’ve bought but haven’t downloaded yet. I have complete records on who has bought what, so if you email me I’ll be able to link you to the files you’re missing. Hopefully we won’t have to do that.

Keep watching this space for updates on the situation. Sorry for the problems, it’s driving me nuts too.

UPDATE 1: Our existing host suggest that I buy a dedicated server for our store at a cost of $449 per month. To put things in perspective simplysyndicated.com costs $4.99 per month. I have already signed up for an account that will cost us £16 per month. I don’t think we’ll be getting the dedicated server.

UPDATE 2: I worked out that according to our stats, each visitor to our store is using over 100MB of data just by browsing the site. Obviously users can’t be using that much data, the site would be so slow to load that you just wouldn’t bother. The hosts are looking in to it.

UPDATE 3: It looks like an update that was performed in June is to blame for the problems. I hate updates. You get something working great and then somebody comes along and tells you they can make it work better. Then like an idiot I go and do the upgrade just to get rid of that “there’s an update available” thing that pops up every time I log in.

UPDATE 4: Couple of bits here, It’s looking more and more like the recent update is what caused the problems.When all is well, you click on a link to download a file. The store system then looks up that file in the database and connects you with it on AmazonS3. I think that the store was downloading the file, then delivering it to you instead, which would account for the sudden spurt in our bandwidth use. Our hosts have been good enough to increase our bandwidth so I can get in and have a poke around. Unfortunately I had already started rebuilding the site on another hosting account so the domain name had already been redirected. I’m now waiting for it to change back so I can get in to the old system and at least make a backup of the database so I can maybe restore it to a new install if necessary. I’m tired, cold and hungry. Please send Jaffa Cakes and Henderson’s.

UPDATE 5: I’m back in the old system and the domain name has propagated. As far as we know the store is back up and running for now. If you’ve bought files that you haven’t downloaded yet I very seriously recommend that you go download them right away. I don’t know how long things will be up and running for. Really, go do it NOW. If you only ever follow one piece of advice I ever give you, please let it be now when I tell you to go and download all the files that you’ve bought and haven’t downloaded yet. Is that clear enough? I want to make very sure that you’ve understood what I’m saying to you. If you have bought a downloadable show from musicalmousemat.com but you haven’t downloaded it yet, then you must go there now and download it. Right now, not in ten minutes, the site might not be there in ten minutes. Also if you want to buy something and download it right away you can do.

UPDATE 6: It’s definitely doing that thing where the server downloads the file then delivers it to you. I got a chart off our stats that shows a list of different file sizes and what percentage of total downloads those files made up. Seeing as the store is just a normal website you should expect to see file sizes around the 1MB and less getting most of the requests. Things like text and small images. However on our stats a whopping 63% of files requested are over 100MB. Strangely most of the files we sell are around 110MB in size. Funny that isn’t it. I’m still not sure what has caused this problem, but it looks like the easiest thing to do would be to reinstall the store system and restore a backup of the database. In my mind it makes sense, it’s just that it’s a bit like when they try to reboot Jurassic Park and I’m the daft idiot that has to go out with the Raptors and turn the power back on. Still at least that’s better than being stuck with the kid who thinks she can work the computer because it’s running UNIX. Yeah, all the UNIX machines are the same.

Test post.

Starting right now you can visit our live show page, click on the stream links and listen to Simply Syndicated Radio. When we aren’t broadcasting a live show you can catch up with the latest episodes of all the Simply Syndicated podcasts.

It works exactly like listening to our live shows except that it works twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.

You can listen on your computer using a variety of applications, as well as most modern smart phones and of course the iPod Touch.

The move to our new server is almost complete. There are still a lot of things that need sorting out before it can be classed as finished but that should be complete before the end of Wednesday. Even so we managed to move things without losing any podcast episodes or forum posts.

At the time of writing this the forum is up and running as it should be. There might be a few problems with the podcast feeds and a couple of other things, but like I say, that will be sorted out very soon. If you see something that doesn’t work please don’t panic. I am aware of everything that isn’t working as it should.

Thank you for holding on for new content until the move is complete. I know there are some of you who are itching for the latest episode, just as there are people itching to post them.

Keep a close eye on my twitter feed (@techsupportrich) or the Simply Syndicated feed (@simpsyn) for news on when everything is working again, when you’ll be able to download shows or when you’ll be able to post them.

Cheers

Rich

Sometime in the next 24 hours I’ll be moving the Simply Syndicated site to a new server. That will result in several hours of down time. During that time you’ll be unable to access the site and RSS feeds. With any luck we’ll be back up and running quickly.

As always with this sort of thing nothing goes to plan. I’m expecting everything that can go wrong to go wrong. If that happens please don’t panic. Even if we end up being away for a couple of days, which is very unlikely, we will be back.

If everything does go to plan, when we come back you won’t notice any change. The site should run a bit quicker and more importantly won’t crash when more than a handful of people turn up. Plus the cost saving will allow us to bring you some more interesting and fun things.

It is with great pleasure that today I can tell you all about the new and exciting things coming to Simply Syndicated.

First of all, we are lucky to be welcoming three new shows to the network. Here Goes Nothing, Nerd Hurdles, and TechSupportRich. You’ll be able to see their show pages on Friday. If you already subscribe to the main Simply Syndicated podcast feed then you’ll be able to download the new shows automatically.

Next we are preparing to launch Simply Read. It will be a new section of our website featuring articles by members of the Simply Syndicated community and producers of our shows. Look out for that launching on Friday.

Finally, we’ll be adding music downloads to our store. From next week you’ll be able to download all of the original music you hear during our live shows.

All of this news was discussed in great detail in the latest episode of …or do you think that’s just bo!!*#ks? which you can find on the front page of our site.

If you like Will, Paddy and Shakespeare then this is your lucky week. Will and Paddy are starring in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and you can go to see it! How awesome is that.

You can find details on the Theatre of the Dales website.

Remember we said it was coming back? Well it will be back on Tuesday the 21st of July. That’s very close.

Watch out for more news.

So far Paddy’s TV Surprise has been released every two weeks. That was simply because Paddy was off to Canada and we only had so many episodes. Now he isn’t going for a while there’s plenty of time to record loads more shows.

Starting next week the show will be released every Wednesday.