God damn.

This last week has me pooped and frustrated and thrilled and more pooped, and it’s all the fault of The Aural Times. Shall we review? Yes!

• Monday, 3/20: Yahoo! links me. Pile of traffic ensues. Great!
• Later, Monday: server bogs down. Apache timing out. Files going undelivered. Front page largely unavailable under the load. Awful!
• Tuesday: I set up a hosting account with Dreamhost— about $8/mo (I paid for the whole year) nets me a cool terabyte of bandwidth each month. Great!
• Later, Tuesday: I get email from a rep at a cellphone downloads retailer inquiring about licensing AT content. Fantastic!
• Thursday: linked by Clicked!. Traffic begins to surge. Great! But then…
• Shortly later on Thursday: a massive DDoS attack commences against joker.com, with whom I do my domain registration business and from whom I have, until this crisis, received excellent nameserver service as well. auraltimes.com (not to mention joshmillard.com and the poor, neglected heatlorraine.com) is no longer resolving most of the time. The site is, essentially, down. Terrible!
• Also on Thursday: talk with rep from mobile services company. Quick phone call, get the general idea and clarify the original (i.e. not sublicensed or, worse, unlicensed non-original) nature of AT’s content. Enthusiasm on both sides, rep promises to send paper work.
• Friday: site still down. Resolve to do something, which comes out to mean changing my nameservice over to ZoneEdit. I do so. Begin waiting for nameserver info to propogate throughout the Internet.
• Saturday, Sunday: site-service situation improves steadily. Issues resolved. New dreamhost setup working — see files.auraltimes.com. Do a bunch of finishing work on the new site design for Aural Times. Polish. Spit. Etc. Make new site live Sunday night. Great!
• Monday, 3/27: come to work, write blog entry. Read over generic contract rep has emailed. Eat cornbread muffins.

Mmm. Cornbread muffins.