<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\nWelcome to 1996. Please enjoy your internet.<\/p>\n
I’m sure you’ve noticed that my site tends to go down a lot. It turns out this blog is a resource pig. According to my webhost, I had an entire machine to myself and it was still going down on a regular basis. About two or three times a month the machine would be overwhelmed for a few hours and the site would vanish. I could never get a definitive answer out of them if the cause was bandwidth or CPU usage. Bandwidth seems unlikely – this site isn’t that<\/em> popular. I’ve survived simultaneous links from Slashdot<\/a> and Make<\/a>. But if the cause is a PHP script that runs amok, I’m at a loss to find it.<\/p>\n But last week they moved me to a new server, in hopes that this would improve things. I also installed supercache<\/a>, which might help lighten the load. I’m very disappointed that web hosts track bandwidth usage but don’t give you any way of tracking CPU usage. It means I’m working blind and have no way to really look for problems.<\/p>\n But anyway. The site moved. This meant a new IP address. Which meant we needed to wait for the DNS to sort out. <\/p>\n But then you need a system of looking up domains and seeing what IP they have. A kind of phone book for the internet. Since the network is headless, keeping everyone on the same page can get messy. Your ISP generally provides a domain name server that does this looking up for you. So when you look up Twitter, it looks up the IP for you and sends you the result.<\/p>\n This DNS is only supposed to store the IP for so long – if you ask for the same site again tomorrow, it’s supposed to look it up again, just in case the site moved.<\/p><\/div>\n