I have received numerous emails asking what happened to the UFO Casebook. I am writing this to clear up some misperceptions and rumors being spread around the net. I did not die, and I was not abducted by aliens.
It is simply a technical problem, and disagreement with the old host of my site... this is what happened. On the 18th of February, the UFO Casebook web site was shut down by bluedomino. I had no warning from the host before this happened.
I immediately went to their live support and was told that my streaming/download video files were taking too much bandwidth from the totality of all of the sites hosted by bluedomino. The only way to get my site back online was for me to delete these videos.
The videos, along with their thumbnail graphics, embedded html files, and metafiles, totaled 459. I offered to pay them more money. I was already using their largest hosting package. They refused.
Keep in mind that I was not anywhere near my limits on bandwidth transfer allowance, or storage. The problem, according to the host, was that the random access demands were too great.
So, after I deleted the files, and waiting an hour or so, the site was still not back up. So, I went back to support and asked them what was holding things up. They then told me that I had to delete 2 more files....swf, or flash files. These are small files, but they told me that the were being called up too often.
This hit me the wrong way... were they saying that I had to find a way to limit the hits on my site? I thought to myself: the idea of having a site was to attempt to gain more and more page views as time goes by.
The two flash files that they asked me to delete display the top portion of the navigation panel that you see on the front page. The other one is on the far left side that allows the user to navigate to various sections of the site. Had I deleted these two files, there would have been x's in both of these places, and essentially no navigation for the user.
Then, I would have had to replace these panels with another form of navigation. Because we use a type of cascading style sheet/html combination, these files would have had to be replaced one at a time. This navigation panel is included on some 75,000 html files. Enough said.
After some searching, I found what I believe is an excellent hosting service, where I can have a virtual server.
What this does is limit one server to handing only a couple of large sites at once. True, this costs more money, but should keep the Casebook going for many years.
The new host has moved close to 1 million items from my old host through ftp. To be able to serve up all of the site essentially the way it looked before, one more task must be accomplished: move my domain pointers from the old site to the new one. This is in progress, and legally the old domain holder can take up to two weeks to do this. But, I was told this normally takes about 4-5 days. It has been two days as of February 20, so hopefully it won't take much longer. Be patient, and we will be back soon.
thanks,
B J
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