Shoot Different

I read a post on this blog yesterday, and it left me dumbfounded.  Apparently, this poor guy got to the front page of digg with one of his posts.  He was on a shared hosting account on pair, one of the bigger, more reliable, and definitely highly recommended hosting providers.  He received this email from them:

Hello,

It appears nsharp.org is on the Digg.com frontpage.

Unfortunately traffic to this site had to be firewalled, as it was overwhelming the server and caused the server to become unresponsive.

We will only be able to lift this block when traffic to this site has significantly decreased. We appreciate your understanding in this matter.

If you have any questions, please let us know.

Thank You,

[name removed]
pair Networks, Inc.
http://www.pair.com

This is wrong on so many levels.  They obviously know how much of a big deal it is to get digg front page.  Yet, instead of calling the customer and trying to work out a solution, or moving him to a dedicated server temporarily, and then trying to upgrade him later, they just pulled the plug.

It’s a shame he wasn’t running any ads on his site, or he could have said that they lost him ad revenue and filed a claim.

He was taking all the necessary precautions, too.  It had been wordpress blog, and he replaced it with a static HTML page to try to ease the load.  The traffic he received was well within his monthly limits, albeit all within an hour or two.  Crazy stuff. 

I have a godaddy hosting account that costs me $15 a month, and it was able to handle getting dugg.  And to top it all off, this guy is now on a free wordpress-hosted site, and they’re more than happy to handle the load for him after the digg-effect.  Let me repeat that.  His current hosting is FREE, and they can handle it.

Great job, pair.