Server update

Here’s what we’ve been able to piece together. The correct DNS is slowly disseminating through the many tiers/branches of domain registries stacked around the globe. In some cases, the servers update every 2 hours, in some cases every 48 hours, and in some cases longer (a week?) We’ve tried a bunch of tricks and tactics to speed things up yesterday and are continuing today. As far as we can tell, 85% of blog readers can now see the adstrips/ads and Blogads.com. That’s up from 60% at the low. (One datapoint is that ad purchases have not slacked off, though I still can’t see Blogads.com from my home computer.) In theory, we should see another improvement today (assuming there are more servers out there with 48-hour caches than we’d originally anticipated). But, theory doesn’t buy lunch, so we’re continuing to look for ways to manually speed the process along. If you have suggestions, we’d love to hear them. I’m very frustrated and apologize. We’ll be issuing make-goods to all advertisers.

In part, this error and a couple of other recent stumbles may be a sign that our Budapest team is overstretched. As a company we tend to try to have more balls in the air than hands. That’s great and keeps you motivated and driving, but when you slip up, it’s ugly. Driving to normalize slightly, we added an additional programmer a month ago and he’s pulled into the swing very quickly. Now we’ve moving towards hiring another strong coder.

For numbers geeks, I don’t know if you can make sense of this graph of one of our server’s bandwidth consumption, but if you compare like time periods, we’re doing roughly 15% better today than yesterday.