The MacDeskBlog

Sorry about the unplanned outage over the weekend. Dreamhost decided that macdesktops.com was using too many resources to remain on a shared server. Rather that contact me and work with me to resolve the issue, they just disabled the main page and sent me an email. Fortunately, they were able to migrate everything to a virtual private server today, with minimal changes required on my end. My costs will go up modestly, but I’m still an order of magnitude below the costs when I had my own hardware co-located. I’ll need to keep an eye on performance and resource utilization over the next week to know what the ultimate bill will end up being.

My apologies for the unexpected downtime.

Ryan

After a very long spell without them, I put ads back on the site. I removed them for performance reasons. I hope that the new implementation will avoid the performance problems caused by the previous implementation.

Please support the site by supporting the sponsors.

GoDaddy hit me with a $900 charge for data transfer overage last month. No warning. They charge $29 for 500GB of transfer per month, and then jack it up to $6/GB for overage transfer. With no warning. They were willing to charge me only $450 for the overage, but not willing to go lower because I could have seen the overage through their exceedingly cumbersome administration console. I was supposed to notice that bandwidth usage had double for the last week of my month for that, and remember that my month ends on the 18th.

I can see that the server went over the bandwidth limit. I can accept that I should pay more for the month. The problems I have with this situation are:
A. $6/GB is an unreasonable rate for overage which $0.058 is the base pre-paid rate;
B. GoDaddy does not make it clear to customers that the overage rate is more than one hundred times the base rate;
C. GoDaddy does not warn of overage before the fact, they expect users to constantly check through GoDaddy’s administration console (which is junk) to make sure everything is fine (which is junk);
D. GoDaddy does not pre-authorization the overage;
E. GoDaddy does not provide any way to make the prepaid bandwidth a cap for the month, they just start charging the overage rate.

So, I cancelled my servers.

I apologize for the inconvenience. Please feel free to contact GoDaddy.com and tell them how screwed up their business is and that their handling of MacDesktops is preventing you from using their services. The billing manager’s name is Mark Danzan. If you talk to him and he tries to tell you that their billing model is like a cell phone plan, please make sure you sympathize mention that you too have a cell phone plan which charges $30/month for 500 minutes and charges $6/min thereafter! Or feel free to contact me and tell me how ridiculous I’m being.

I am working on another hosting arrangement for the future. In the meantime, I am very close to having the site up and running on my home servers, with images spread across two DSL lines.

I know I haven’t been posting the financials of MacDesktops for the past few months. I wish that were because I’m breaking even now. Alas, it’s just because I’ve been too busy. Support of advertisers and usage of commission links would be appreciated. Given the conditions in Gulf Coast right now, and the great need for charitable contributions to organizations such as the Red Cross, I’m hesitant to even mention that donations would still be welcome too. But if you think that MacDesktops provides a service which is worth something to you, please think about sending a little something after helping southern Mississippi and Louisiana.

Just before I left for vacation, I finally cancelled my colocation with NetStep. They are a good bunch of people and highly recommend them if you are looking for colocation services or an ISP in Upstate New York, or VoIP services. Personally, I decided that colocation doesn’t appear to be the best solution for me, particularly colocation 3000 miles from my house. Doing software updates, hardware upgrades, and server maintenance is just too hard that way. So, I’m now committed down the dedicated server route.

Now I just need to carve out some time to configure the dedicated server enough to cut over from the virtual dedicated server. This process has already taken way too long. I need to force myself to wrap up the process so I can shift my energy and focus on more useful things like my house, the site overhaul, work, and my personal life.

Cancellation of colocation will have an immediate effect upon overhead expenses, dropping those for May. That will be partially offset by some shipping expense to get the old server back, but I’ll come out ahead overall.