Help stop SOPA in any way you can!
The Digital Empire network (my blogs, services, and other sites) will be blacked out on January 18th for 12 hours. I apologize in advance if this inconveniences anybody--however, just try to imagine the terrible impact that SOPA will have on the Internet if it is passed.
If you run a blog or website, join us in protest by blacking out your website with an overlay on the 18th. Feel free to share your thoughts about SOPA on the overlay, and explain to visitors about the potential ramifications if the bill passes.
Even if you don't run your own site, you can help! Check out the article Hate SOPA? 6 things you can do to stop it for some ways that anybody can help in the fight against Internet censorship.
Related articles
- Reddit to go silent in SOPA protest (news.cnet.com)
- SOPA: Anonymous Extends OpBlackout Protest to non-US Citizens (ibtimes.com)
- Reddit is Having a Blackout on 18 January in Protest Against SOPA [Internet] (gizmodo.com)
- Will Reddit's SOPA Blackout Make a Difference? (readwriteweb.com)
- Is SOPA Internet Censorship and a Threat to Free Speech? (blogcritics.org)
- Internet users are urging Wikipedia to 'go black' in protest of SOPA / PIPA (thenextweb.com)
- Nuke the Net: How to Get the Mainstream Talking About the Dangers of SOPA (mashable.com)
- Reddit's SOPA Blackout Admirable, but Google and Facebook Must Follow (forbes.com)
Thanks, UK2… No, really, thanks.
Sarcasm? No, that wasn't sarcasm. I never use that.
You may have noticed most of my websites have been very ugly for the past couple of days. The reason for this is that UK2 have seemingly used some very underhanded business tactics to shut down SimpleCDN, their customer and my Content Delivery Network responsible for delivering much of my static content.
Over the next day or so all of our sites should be fully back online, albeit temporarily without a CDN while we get set up somewhere else.
I'm not in a position to say that SimpleCDN has done nothing wrong, and that it's all UK2's fault (though that is what outward appearances make it seem). However, I would certainly recommend that anyone thinking about signing up with them watch this situation closely and use its final outcome as a determining factor in whether they are someone you wish to do business with.
You can follow the situation from SimpleCDN's perspective here. If you're as frustrated as me by the situation, I urge you to do as I have done and contact UK2 to voice your opinion.
Related articles
- What's a CDN? Content Delivery Network (marketingtechblog.com)
- SimpleCDN has been effectively kicked off the Internet by its ISPs w/o warning (admin.simplecdn.com)
Finally…
Though the title, and the fact that you're here now, says enough already, I am happy to announce my new server and websites are back up at yet another new host.
Over the next few days, I'll be tweaking things, updating my core WordPress and Drupal installations, and causing general mayhem throughout my entire environment. My monitoring systems need to be overhauled completely and until then I will not have any good monitoring in place.
Let me know if you experience any odd issues--I haven't changed anything in any of my databases or files on the new server, so it's possible something won't work right until it's updated. Although I've kept all paths identical to avoid many such issues.
Known Server Issues
No need to inform me about the following server issues, which I apologize in advance for:
- CPU time to generate some WordPress and Drupal pages is surpassing 30 seconds. I am actively looking into this and suspect it's some sort of VPS issue with queue times. This is my top priority.
- Caching is not working properly. No pages are being cached on most of my sites. The pages are still working fine, but because of the above performance issue this can become excruciating. I will have caching working properly by the time the previous issue is resolved.
- Our CDN is not set up correctly. We are using SimpleCDN to host many of our static assets, for performance reasons. It is correctly pulling most assets automatically, however you will notice some pictures in our posts are broken, and other links may not work quite right yet. This is being worked on actively as well.
If you have noticed anything other than these three problems, please let me know so I can work on those as well. I am assessing the entire Digital Empire infrastructure which is why things are taking longer than they otherwise would, but the end result should be a more stable, much faster network.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=fa601dce-409c-4a65-9e53-9870daf19a09)
Transition to new domain name
As you have likely noticed, my blog is now running on http://technologykills.com.
Links pointing to the old URL of http://blog.benmcclure.com will still work, but will all forward to the http://technologykills.com homepage. To fix, simply change your links to point to http://technologykills.com instead, and they will work like they did before.
If you notice any quirks or issues with the site running in its new location, let me know and I will work to resolve it immediately.
Thanks for sticking with me during this transition!
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=cd634c01-bdc0-43ab-9851-16f312c2e531)
Apache issues resolved, sites back online
Yes, finally, with a little help from the cPanel team, I got Apache/PHP to rebuild correctly, and my sites are again working properly!
Of course, I am still working on the slowness issue. Even with page caching, Apache and suPHP thrash the CPU for several seconds the first time a large dynamic page is loaded. I'm trying to narrow this down to either server configuration or a VPS issue.
I have definitely experienced this before on an over-allocated VMware array, so it's a possibility my web server is just on a busy host box. But I'm still tuning things on the server and trying to minimize the load in every way I can, because more often than not these things are caused by configuration oversight or lack of proper tuning (and user naivety perhaps, in my case).
Monitoring System In Place
In a further effort to make all sites and services in the DE network stable and ensure the highest uptime, we have deployed a full-scale monitoring server at an off-site location in Germany.
This means that we can get a full picture of our network and service status at a glance at any time. It also means we are notified when anything goes down, is running slowly, or becomes unresponsive. In addition, we have the ability to automatically bring things back online and resolve some issues without having to wait for me to fix them.
This is a big jump forward for our network infrastructure, and this means we are now running four full network servers in four different datacenters spanning three countries to provide our sites and services under the highest quality and most ideal circumstances.
Let me know what you think! Have you noticed a difference in any of our sites and services? Is there anything you'd like to see, or any changes you'd like made? We'd love to hear from you!
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=eadf5368-2b0c-4633-96c0-25c1802ae4ed)
Is it up or is it down?
I'd like to sincerely apologize if anyone tried to visit my blog, or any other Digital Empire site, and was not able to get to it.
For the past hour or so, I've gotten reports of the site being inaccessible sporadically. I have also seen this myself, as all of my equipment has been down for the past 15 or 20 minutes.
As you can see by this post, the issue seems to be resolved for the moment.
My current service provider is undergoing a management change, and is taking care of some long-standing issues, so hopefully these problems were a result of the firewall finally being set up properly.
My servers already ran great, but it was taking weeks to get any request through. I firmly hope (and expect) to receive better service going forward with the new owners.
Server Move Complete
I have finally completed moving my servers around to a couple of different providers. This has served me very well so far. My sites are faster, several of my nameservers are on different providers/networks, and I'm even saving money!
Check blog.thedigitalempire.com for more details and additional site news.
DEblog Open for Business!
I have opened the DEblog over at The Digital Empire, and this site will allow me to keep everyone updated about everything happening within the Digital Empire network (basically everything I do).
This includes news and articles about such sites/services as:
- This one! (benmcclure.com/technologykills.com)
- PC GameSource
- SingularityShift
- Fallout Mod Sorter (FOMS)
- Fallout Games (Returning soon!)
- DigiPress
- And more!
If interested, please subscribe and/or bookmark the site so you can keep up on the latest DE news and happenings!