What's New

Tavern Trove is back up!

Some of you may have noticed that Tavern Trove was down for about two weeks. Here are the details for those who are interested:

This all started early this year. Tavern Trove at the time was hosted by Go-Daddy, one of the biggest hosting companies around. During January and February Go-Daddy's servers were repetedly attacked by Indonesia-based Hoodia peddlers using TavernTrove.com and other Go-Daddy supported emails as return addresses for their spam. There were several days where I got thousands of bounced emails in my in-box and my email service was shut down because I was over-quota. As I understand it, this problem became so severe that it threatened to bring all Go-Daddy supported domains to a grinding halt On February 20th Go-Daddy decided to pull the plug and fix the issue. Because of this Tavern Trove and hundreds of other clients of Go-Daddy's Virtual Dedicated Servers were shut down - without notice - for just over 40 hours. To make matters worse, we were also ordered to reconfigure our sites (at our expense) to conform to Go-Daddy's new specs.

After my web administrator Brian reconfigured Tavern Trove and Go-Daddy got all their ducks in a row Tavern Trove was brought back up. Then a couple of days later Brian got another email from Go-Daddy telling him that Tavern Trove needed to be reconfigured because of a "Security Threat." Naturally Brian called and asked if he really needed to do it, explaining he had just reconfigured the site two days earlier. Go-Daddy said no, sorry, everyone is getting that email. Disregard it. Brian got a similar email a week later and was again told to ignore it by Go-Daddy staff.

Three days after that Go-Daddy pulled the site down and wiped the server clean. All the Trove files were ERASED! Brian went to our backed up copy but due to the size of the files (over 200,000 photos, for example), they came back corrupted. After several days and several angry calls to Go-Daddy we got to the "president's office" and were pleased to find out that they have a "Earthquake Backup" that is to be used in case of a catastrophic disaster - but - these files had never been tested in real life. Luckily, the Earthquake Backup worked. If not, Tavern Trove would have had to be rebuilt.

As if things could not get any worse, Brian told me that this incident proved to him that neither Go-Daddy nor he was not up to the task of servicing Tavern Trove. The site had simply grown too large for them to manage. After interviewing several companies I decided to go with LogicalSolutions.net out of Rochester, New York. They came with an excellent recommendation from Brian, whom I trust implicitly. Unfortunately, they cost about five times what I am used to paying.

Brian told me he would bow out as the Tavern Trove web designer effective pretty much immediately. During the past six months he has received his masters degree, become engaged, established a career and purchased his first house. Brian has been my wingman for the last two and a half years and has worked long into many nights for me and my flights of fancy. I have emailed him countless times at two in the morning to tell him some minor function on Tavern Trove wasn’t working. More often than not he would reply 10 minutes later - telling me “Try It Now.” I was really lucky to have Brian as my web guy. It is sad to see him go.

Thank you all for your support,

Erik

Tavern Trove: What's New

What's New