Many of you have told me recently that the site seems to be running slower and slower.  Some of you have mentioned that there are times when you can't get a page to load properly — or at all.  These things I know.

There have been two problems that were/are causing this.

The first is MSN Search.  One of the MSN web crawlers (msnbot64097) recently got stuck in a loop and pounded my site for several days.  By pounding, I mean it was generating thousands of hits (near 10,000) each day and was posting GET requests to the web server every few seconds.  That really slowed things down.  Microsoft can't write decent software, so I'm not surprised that their latest attempt to break into the Internet search market is riddled with bugs.  They eventually stopped the attack, but only after much complaining by me.  Over the course of the last week (when this was happening), the crawler generated three times as much traffic as I received in the entire month of April.  Needless to say that caused some serious access issues.

The second problem is my hosting provider and server.  Neither is very good.  I won't waste your time with the boring details, but understand that I've grown quite displeased with the service and server and am already evaluating new options.  The intention is to move the site to a different hosting service and a new dedicated server.

If all goes well, I'll be finalizing the move in the next few days.  There may be an outage while I move the site, but I'll do my best to minimize that.  Stay tuned for details on when this will be happening.