G’day Hubsters,
It’s been a long and stressful past couple of weeks, but the Hub is finally back up and running.
First of all I want to start out by saying thank you to all of you who reached out to us asking if everything was okay with the Hub, your concern means a great deal to all of the Hub staff. And secondly, I want to apologise to everyone who has visited, or tried to visit the Hub, over the past few weeks and have received any one of a number of error messages. Although the technical difficulties experienced at the site were largely outside my control and were caused by our host, I still feel that I have let you all down in not being able to solve the problem sooner, and have failed in the Hub’s mission to bring you all of the latest Colbert news as soon as it breaks. I know this literally could not have happened at a worse time. But I can assure you that we have been keeping up-to-date with all that Stephen Colbert has been doing, and that we cannot wait to start sharing it all with you again, including a very special taping report. So stay tuned!
In the meantime, here is a break down of what happened to the Hub, the steps we have taken to over come the problems, and what it means for the future of the site.
For about the past month now, we’ve been experiencing some technical difficulties behind-the-scenes, some of which you may have noticed. What started out as a simple issue that required a little time to fix, quickly escalated to our host locking us out of the site completely and randomly blocking IP addresses without notifying me. Things only got worse from there.
Initially I received a ticket notifying me of an issue that needed fixing, and to respond to the ticket listing the steps I had taken to resolve the issue. I responded, and received no reply, so they sent me multiple tickets all notifying me of the same issue, before completely locking me (and you) out of the site, leaving me unable to attend to the issue any further. So I contacted our host’s support service (and waited on hold for almost an hour) to see what the deal was, and their response was that they were “reviewing the issue as soon as humanly possible”. Over the next five days I contacted their support service multiple times, but was either told that they had bumped our ticket up the list, or to “contact a web developer”.
Five days and no reply, I was losing patience, and quickly my little site was slipping away from me, along with our loyal readers. How do you explain to tech folk that know nothing about Stephen or The Report that now more than ever, my site simply cannot go down? The simple answer is that you cannot, and quite frankly I don’t think our host could give a rat’s ass about our business or our site.
Technically I was out of my depth of knowledge and had run out of ways to try and “fix” things with the limited access I had. Fearing that we could completely lose the site and everything we had worked so hard for over the past three and a half years, I was left with no choice but to blow the Hub’s small budget completely out of the water, and hire a web developer who could help regain control of a situation rapidly slipping away from me.
After filling our new web developer in on the situation, they tried contacting our host to sort of the situation, but couldn’t even get onto a support worker who understood the situation, let alone was qualified to help. With the situation worsening and the site down, more than it was up, it became clear that we were left with no other choice but to move to a new host.
So, over the past couple of days our web developer moved the site over to our new host, and has been working with me to smooth out any issues caused by the move. If you dropped by the site over the weekend, you may have noticed that it looked a little different. That was all caused by the move. For the most part things are back to normal now, but you may still encounter a few issues here and there, so please do notify me if you have any problems while using the site. A few hiccups and problems here and there are to be expected, after all, moving a website from one host to another is basically like moving house. Things get lost and broken along the way, and take a little time to be found and fixed again, so please bear with us while we work through ironing out all of the little issues that pop up.
For the most part, little has changed at the Hub, but I will be posting a few more site updates over the coming days filling you in on a few changes and additions we will be making to the site, and how we will progress once the show finishes. The most notable change you may have noticed, is that we have now migrated (with the help of our web developer) over to using the Disqus commenting system. Sleek and professional, Disqus has many advantages over our old commenting system, which I will write more on soon, but for now, those of you unfamiliar with Disqus, here is a little how-to on how to register with Disqus so that you can resume commenting on the site.
I would just like to finish up by saying a massive thank you to Wayne for all of his incredibly hard work and patience over this past week. Without him we would be nothing but a white screen and a ‘database error’. And to Amber, thank you for understanding how important it was for us to have the site up and running as quickly as possible, and for hooking us up with Wayne. You have both been incredible!!
Site News: Technical Issues Update
It’s been a long and stressful past couple of weeks, but the Hub is finally back up and running.
First of all I want to start out by saying thank you to all of you who reached out to us asking if everything was okay with the Hub, your concern means a great deal to all of the Hub staff. And secondly, I want to apologise to everyone who has visited, or tried to visit the Hub, over the past few weeks and have received any one of a number of error messages. Although the technical difficulties experienced at the site were largely outside my control and were caused by our host, I still feel that I have let you all down in not being able to solve the problem sooner, and have failed in the Hub’s mission to bring you all of the latest Colbert news as soon as it breaks. I know this literally could not have happened at a worse time. But I can assure you that we have been keeping up-to-date with all that Stephen Colbert has been doing, and that we cannot wait to start sharing it all with you again, including a very special taping report. So stay tuned!
In the meantime, here is a break down of what happened to the Hub, the steps we have taken to over come the problems, and what it means for the future of the site.
For about the past month now, we’ve been experiencing some technical difficulties behind-the-scenes, some of which you may have noticed. What started out as a simple issue that required a little time to fix, quickly escalated to our host locking us out of the site completely and randomly blocking IP addresses without notifying me. Things only got worse from there.
Initially I received a ticket notifying me of an issue that needed fixing, and to respond to the ticket listing the steps I had taken to resolve the issue. I responded, and received no reply, so they sent me multiple tickets all notifying me of the same issue, before completely locking me (and you) out of the site, leaving me unable to attend to the issue any further. So I contacted our host’s support service (and waited on hold for almost an hour) to see what the deal was, and their response was that they were “reviewing the issue as soon as humanly possible”. Over the next five days I contacted their support service multiple times, but was either told that they had bumped our ticket up the list, or to “contact a web developer”.
Five days and no reply, I was losing patience, and quickly my little site was slipping away from me, along with our loyal readers. How do you explain to tech folk that know nothing about Stephen or The Report that now more than ever, my site simply cannot go down? The simple answer is that you cannot, and quite frankly I don’t think our host could give a rat’s ass about our business or our site.
Technically I was out of my depth of knowledge and had run out of ways to try and “fix” things with the limited access I had. Fearing that we could completely lose the site and everything we had worked so hard for over the past three and a half years, I was left with no choice but to blow the Hub’s small budget completely out of the water, and hire a web developer who could help regain control of a situation rapidly slipping away from me.
After filling our new web developer in on the situation, they tried contacting our host to sort of the situation, but couldn’t even get onto a support worker who understood the situation, let alone was qualified to help. With the situation worsening and the site down, more than it was up, it became clear that we were left with no other choice but to move to a new host.
So, over the past couple of days our web developer moved the site over to our new host, and has been working with me to smooth out any issues caused by the move. If you dropped by the site over the weekend, you may have noticed that it looked a little different. That was all caused by the move. For the most part things are back to normal now, but you may still encounter a few issues here and there, so please do notify me if you have any problems while using the site. A few hiccups and problems here and there are to be expected, after all, moving a website from one host to another is basically like moving house. Things get lost and broken along the way, and take a little time to be found and fixed again, so please bear with us while we work through ironing out all of the little issues that pop up.
For the most part, little has changed at the Hub, but I will be posting a few more site updates over the coming days filling you in on a few changes and additions we will be making to the site, and how we will progress once the show finishes. The most notable change you may have noticed, is that we have now migrated (with the help of our web developer) over to using the Disqus commenting system. Sleek and professional, Disqus has many advantages over our old commenting system, which I will write more on soon, but for now, those of you unfamiliar with Disqus, here is a little how-to on how to register with Disqus so that you can resume commenting on the site.
I would just like to finish up by saying a massive thank you to Wayne for all of his incredibly hard work and patience over this past week. Without him we would be nothing but a white screen and a ‘database error’. And to Amber, thank you for understanding how important it was for us to have the site up and running as quickly as possible, and for hooking us up with Wayne. You have both been incredible!!