My (former) hosting company Dreamhost began having intermittent problems one week ago. Some of my sites would go down and then up again. The Dreamhost Status blog talked about “Sporadic brief network outages” and promised to fix them, so I waited. Then, by the end of last week, suddenly all my blogs started going down with the “Error 500: Internal Server Error” message. I got emails from friends to warn me, but thanks to my Montastic account, I had a pretty good idea of when they went down, and up again, and down … A friggin’ Christmas tree!

I sent mails to the Dreamhost support service, some of which were answered within the advertised 24 hours (but not all), but none of them any helpful. “I just checked and the blog/site is working correctly” (I’m sure it was, in between downtimes), “The machine was just restarted so all the apaches were still loading” (the restart didn’t help), “Is it possible a script in your code that’s taking longer than it should?” (how about you tell me?) “possibly people are hotlinking your pictures so it’s causing your site to go slow?” (No, all my pictures come from Flickr). “It appears some of the scripts on your site are being killed by our process watcher program” (no kidding!? which ones? what site?).

After 4 days of asynchronous communication it became clear that: 1) the problems weren’t going away, 2) Dreamhost was not able to tell me why they were crippling my server, 3) after reading dozens of articles on the Dreamhost wiki, disabling most of my sites, disabling scripts, I had no idea what I could do about it. Personally, I think another customer/process on the shared hosting was gobbling up the CPU/memory and left nothing for the rest of us. Even a simple SSH terminal session would time out, leaving only FTP and phpMyAdmin for basic management.

Thoroughly fed up with the lack of support, I decided to bite the bullet and migrate the hell out of there. I contacted OpenMinds in Gent, who I know through Barcamp and also highly regarded by Bart. They gave me a good offer for the busy multi-blogger that I am, and I started migrating yesterday. Currently, blog.forret.com, barcamp.forret.com and brusselstangofestival.forret.com (a placeholder for the Brussels Tango Festival blog) are up and running again.

Unfortunately, being stressed and hurried makes you do things without thinking them through. In order to be able to point blog.forret.com to the new hosting account, I had to delete the ‘blog’ subdomain from my Dreamhost account. On the mySQL database linked to that, I had my blog.forret.com Wordpress database, which I backed up and restored to the new hosting. Regrettably I also had a number of other databases, for other blogs, that I did not back up. So I seem to have lost the database for winadmin.forret.com (don’t bother to go and look, it’s quite desolate). For some random reason I did back up the video.forret.com database, so that should come back online soon (when the DNS changes are OK). There will probably be other corpses in the closet (the odd Wiki here and there), but I hope to migrate all my sites by the end of this month, and then leave Dreamhost. Welcome to an Open Mind!

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Richard and Katie

The old URL now consists of a redirect page to www.richardandkatie.co.uk (NSFW). On this new site, we learn that the three-way action did take place, it took a full 45 minutes and they’re still editing it into a 20-minute video that will be available soon. The reinforcement they invited goes by the name of Holly, a dark-haired girl with an above-average cup-size.

The video will be put up on the site a.s.a.p its taking a few days due to editing – because believe me there are a couple of things that should be left to the imagination – for one my inability to perform during the first half hour… but more on that another day!!!

There is a preview of the video, some screenshots from the video, an empty “Daily Journal”, an empty “Your videos”, some pictures on the “Your pictures” page and a “Chat board” (a phpBB forum). They promise to update the site on a daily basis, and I think they mean with that the forum they started on August 11th. Most comments there are either “when will the video be ready“, “is this for real” or “I think threesomes are bad for your relationship/ emancipation/ ego/ knees/…“. Richard concludes most discussions with “wait and see!”.

Forensics

They sure did a better job of hiding their tracks this time. Their domain name has only a name, but no email – impossible to trace.

Domain name: richardandkatie.co.uk
Registrant: Barry Mason
Registrant type: UK Individual
Registrant’s address: The registrant is a non-trading individual who has opted to have their address omitted from the WHOIS service.

The HTML quality has deteriorated: no <HTML> tag, no </HEAD> tag, so it might actually be Richard now who’s making the site (or Holly, who knows what other talents she has). The pro-series stats counter is gone, and the whole site make a more modest impression.

Future

The site is sponsored by Golden Root, a provider of blue pills, and they include a quote from Richard: he has used them for his prior film appearance, and will be using them again for his foursome. What foursome? No more info is included on the site. (Apparently it’s the same bet, but now with 15 Mio hits) An extra 2 girls? An extra 2 guys? Some battery-powered devices? Who knows…

Why the new domain name? Maybe they sold the first domain name for a good price with a redirect-for-a-period clause. Maybe they realized they had 2 brand names (the pleasemakethiswork domain, and the Richard & Katie personalities) and they would be worth more when split up. But I think their momentum is gone. Somehow I feel they might not get to their 15-millions-of-fame (hits, that is).

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