Server outage information [2006]
 

For those that wondered why the site was down so much in February 2006...

In late 2005, our hosting provider was bought out by a new company. The new company essentially liquidated their assets and moved existing customers onto their own equipment at another facility in another state. Promises were made that the transitions would be smooth and transparent. That never happened. The new company was just pitiful, with heavy server outages. Their supposed "newer and more updated" hardware and setup was inferior. Tech support that was pretty much impotent, they had to "escalate" pretty much everything, it was like talking to glorified secretaries rather than techs. Most of mid/late February was spent researching alternatives, and one was found. Aside from the video tips weblog, everything has been restored as of March 2006.

1st Edit/Update (April 2006): For those that are curious the craptastic rat-bastard company was READYHOSTING, and should avoided at all costs. Tech support came across as incompetent and wholly ineffective.

2nd Edit/Update (August 2010): Just to update this even more... After leaving RH, our next host was equally as horrible -- the goons of IonHosting, who later admitted to us in email that they didn't really understand Windows and suggested we move our ASP and ASP.NET sites to a Linux box. After that obvious ignorant suggestion, we left after putting up with their terrible servers for all of 3 months. Since June 2006, we've been with EuroVPS, who have proven themselves to be excellent in all areas (tech knowledge, hardware, uptime, software management, etc).

3rd Edit/Update (January 2011): The destruction and loss of the blog in 2006 never sat well with us, so 2011 will see the return of regular weekly editorials, in an all-new format for the site. We'll also be working to recover the old articles (which are not outdated in any way, because it was technical how-to tips), from the severely damaged MySQL files that we were left with.