The short word on all this is we’re still working on it.

We had the Hayride on one of those shared-server packages through GoDaddy. And it worked fine up until this week.

But when the Westboro/Mississippi story went viral late Monday night and into Tuesday, we started seeing problems with site access. Even the admins and contributors on the site had trouble getting to it to update it. And so we started the process of migrating to a dedicated server to handle the traffic, but that’s a lot more complicated procedure than it was originally presented as.

Not to mention the fact that Wednesday was a more acute problem than Tuesday was. We did 108,000 page views on Tuesday, which was enough to strain the server we’re on (the previous record was 31,000 page views). On Wednesday we did 198,000. That made for what Oscar would call a goatscrew.

So we’re trying to work through all the tech-geek stuff required to keep a goatscrew from turning into a Charlie Foxtrot – namely, not fouling up the migration to the dedicated server. Some progress was made on Wednesday, but we’re hoping today or tomorrow will get us set up for finishing the job and making it so the traffic can get as big as it wants and we won’t worry about anybody having site access problems.

Of course, we’ll get all this finished and the traffic spike we’re having now will drop off, so in two weeks it won’t hardly make a difference what server we’re on. But this is about handling the next traffic spike rather than this one. Because we expect to have another one at some point – it’s kinda why we’re here.

In the meantime, bear with us. And if you’re still having problems pulling us up, the later at night you’re doing it the less trouble you’ll have.

Which is weak advice, I know. But it’s what we’ve got until the Great Migration is done, which will hopefully come within hours rather than days.