One day it was there. The next day it was all gone. The Cheers had
disappeared into that mysterious zone of space known as 404 ERROR -
File NOT Found! Someone had temporarily destroyed our home. Who were
these evil-doers sabotaging our fledgling online magazine? STRIPPERS!
Dirty, moody, ass-waving STRIPPERS!
OK, strippers didn't REALLY
bring down The Cheers for some 60 hours last week. People who wanted to
learn about strippers did. Allow me to explain.
Bad, Sal! Bad!
Sal
Amato's first submission to The Cheers dealt with the pros and cons of
his job working at a strip club. It was a funny piece and it was on our
front page. Being a rather eclectic magazine with a wide variety of
subjects covered every week, it was decided that the stripper article
was sure to get a few more readers and attract more attention to our
little magazine. We were right.
After three months of submitting
articles to the prestigious www.fark.com, we finally had one piece,
Sal's "Reality Stripping," accepted & listed. At least I think fark
is prestigious. I know we want many more things to be listed there. I
wouldn't know for sure as I don't read much of anything. I just write
things for other people's enjoyment and surf for porn. I digress.
Fark
is a sort of wheelhouse for online publications. On a daily basis,
headlines from online versions of major publications as well as
internet-only ventures get listed at www.fark.com. People can scour
through the headlines, find stories that interest them most and even
comment on the quality of content. It is a pretty cool place that
attracts millions of readers. They have a lot of fun features including
bulletin boards, chat rooms, and not surprisingly - pictures of hot
chicks and links to websites featuring excellent boobs! After hours of
looking through the latter-mentioned links I realized why our site
crashed.
Fark. The Other White Meat.It was the headline that did
us in. We'd all forgotten that this is the internet. Nothing, and I
mean NOTHING will get more attention online than SEX! Our headline
hinted at insider info about nature's perfect food, the stripper.
People saw this and began clicking on the link. They clicked...and
clicked...and clicked some more. Before too long our little site, a
site that previously had only 70 -100 visitors a day, had about 3,000
hits in a few short hours. 48 hours later over 21,700 people had tried
to access our site. Suddenly we were a success. Unfortunately, The
Cheers got farked!
The Great Cheers Crash of 2004 had
occurred. Our server died & the fine folks at
www.StrictlyHosting.co.uk wisely decided that it was time for The
Cheers to find a new home, a bigger home, a stronger home, a home that
could handle massive amounts of traffic on our very tight budget of
zero dollars a month. I'm told zero dollars is not much, although I
believe if we converted to the Euro we'd do pretty well. I know that
zero U.S. dollars converted into Canadian dollars would give us enough
money to buy 1,000 acres of land. Again, I digress.
[BB]
There's
no love lost between The Cheers and StrictlyHosting. They've been a
great home to us and we appreciate their generosity with regard to our
budget and needs. They are a great company and we can recommend their
services to anyone. In their own words, we were "victims of our own
success." Proud of our little disaster we searched for a new dedicated
server the same way a young man would look for his first apartment
(Except for Siim, our Editor-in-Chief. We think he still lives with his
parents!).
Que? I live where?
Regardless of our wildly
growing popularity, we still had no money to offer anyone. We are a
strictly volunteer-powered venture and we make no money from
advertising. Everyone works for free which is why I am really, REALLY
looking for a new job. (PSST! Anyone at The Onion...click here and read
my work!). Our hero, Siim Einfeldt, being a young and nave lad, went
out into the virtual world and made a simple plea that was sure to be
ignored by anyone with common sense and bills to pay. I give you the
innocent request from his post at WebHostingTalk.com.
"Hi Everyone
I'm
editor-in-chief of a web magazine The Cheers (thecheers.org). I managed
to get a link to one of the articles on the site - "Reality stripping"
- feature from a strip club. And the site where the link went, has
really heavy traffic. Unfortunately, this managed to bring my server
down lol...1 visits/second....since last night (within 10 hours) I have
received 14 000 clicks through this site. However, unfortunately only a
few actually made it to the site.
I'm hoping to get the site
up in couple of hours (with denied requests from that site). But most
likely this will be just temporary. So in the long run (or probably not
so long...), I will probably have to find a host that can handle also
this kind of traffic (even though I might not get back to this type of
number before months...).
Lets be honest - I don't really hope
you have. BUT if someone has something to offer (for free) that would
be able to take such many requests if needed and also support php and
mysql on the server then be sure to let me know. As no money goes
through the magazine and even all the contributors are volunteers, I
couldn't pay anything. But if, independent of that, someone is ready to
offer me something, please let me know.
Thanks
Siim Einfeldt"
Isn't
he just the cutest thing? The balls on this guy! Honestly, wouldn't you
want to send him a heaping dose of the Melissa Virus on general
principal alone?
Miraculously, he got a few responses from
actual people wanting to help! No really, check it out. We were all
amazed that Siim found somebody willing to save The Cheers from
extinction. That somebody was Roi Sundoro of www.roidigital.com, the
single greatest company in the world (Pandering, anyone?). A little
back-and-forth about our needs and his company, some magic with the
domain DNS and PRESTO! The Cheers is NEW & IMPROVED! Or at least it
is "visible," which is key to a website. We tried a few invisible
website magazines and there were too many comparisons to the New York
Post.
So there you have it, our first triumphant fark-up on
display and explained in easy-to-follow terms. It may have been the
first time our site has crashed, but if our increasing traffic and
popularity are indicators I'm proud to predict that it won't be our
last. In fact, now that we know the secret to increased traffic is SEX,
I can guarantee we'll crash again. Just check out the cool new banner
ads we've got lined up. Targeting the perverts is the only way to go!
For more information about Andy Martello, check out his website.
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