Home Local Business From the Publisher: Status Update on our Website

From the Publisher: Status Update on our Website

by ECT

Today, on Thanksgiving, I am happy to announce that EastCountyToday.net (ECT) is back online after being down for the past 36-hrs and ending hopefully months of frustration for everyone who visits this site.

In the end, ECT had to migrate the site away from our hosting company of 4-years due to lack of service, empty promises and consistent runarounds. ECT has now been migrated to a new hosting company and hope this will be the solution after months of frustrations.

One lesson I would urge all of you to consider that if you ever call a company who has customer support and if you talk to 15-people and you get 15-different answers—get far away from that company as fast as possible. This was by far, one of the worst experiences to date in dealing with another company.

Over the past several months, on a conservative estimate, nearly 100-hours have been spent trying to resolve the sites backend issues—that is time that could have otherwise been spent producing content and covering happenings around Contra Costa County.

So why did the site keep going down?

The simple answer, too much traffic.

This is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good because it shows we are still growing and people want the information, but is a bad thing when one is not built to handle large amounts of traffic in the form of simultaneous connection traffic.

The second issue is because ECT is now in year five and as of this post, we have 10,020 pieces of content on this site—add in another 10,000+ photographs and you have a very large site which bogged down the speed.  Many older photographs from 2012, 2013, and 2014 have now been purged while new optimization processes have been put in place to resolve it going forward.

In the next few days, there will be some minor tweaks to the site in the backend which may result in slow speed and minor downtime in “off hours”.  By early December, the site should be back 100% normal—keeping my fingers crossed.

I would like to thank our readers and advertisers for your patience in this process. Finally, a huge shout out to Bob Mankin at Old River Media Group in Discovery Bay for the assist and tackling this entire issue. He spent countless hours trying to keep the site active as we worked through this process. He has been a godsend.  There would be no ECT without his efforts and words cannot express my appreciation to him.

Moving forward, it is my hope that these changes will result in no more “errors”, connection issues, and frustration to our readers who are trying to get information.

Mike Burkholder
Publisher

For any questions, concerns, or advertising questions for 2018, please email [email protected]

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3 comments

Julio Nov 23, 2017 - 4:47 pm

Thank you Mike. We have missed ECT!

Karen Harrison Nov 23, 2017 - 8:13 pm

I have missed your publication also. I have come to rely on as my number 1 source for news.

Johnny Firefighter Nov 23, 2017 - 10:10 pm

Thank you Mike. Thank you Bob.

Glad to have you back online!

Comments are closed.