The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth:
Expansions' ISP services are paid yearly, there was never an "account" problem. form the beginning of time since we changed the web site in July 2005, the growth and increased activity has been much more than we anticipated.
As we struggled to keep up with it, the ISP we selected was also experiencing growing pains. They have switched us twice to new servers, causing a great deal of work for us. This would work for awhile and then the server loads would catch up with our growth (did everyone see we had a high of 50 users online, at the forums last week?).
This last month we actually had two problems that we thought were one, and caused us a great deal of anguish in trying to resolve.
1) Our ban list for forum disrupters had become too large and thus unmanageable, we had some bad entries, and this was causing the forum access problems, nothing else. We are still working on cleaning this up, but for the most part, the problem is solved, although we may, in the near future, be requiring that everyone register as a guest or member.
2) Our ISP accused us of overloading their server and disabled our account. We fought with them and finally got our account reactivated. However, we were very disappointed in their "account disabled" message and the fact that we continued to have problems with them for days afterward because they did not correctly re-activate our account.
So, what are we going to do about it?
One thing everyone should keep in mind is that there is no dedicated webmaster or administrator; Janet and Stewart are consumed daily with responding to everyone who contacts them and working on their books, providing consultations, etc . . .
Lisa is pregnant and not able to put forth the same level of work she once did, what with twins and all, don't think she ever will be able to again, but I know she will try her best.
I myself have a regular job to pay the bills, we are not compensated monetarily for our work here and I still need to put a roof over our heads, and get ready for the babies. I usually spend time in the morning (very early) looking for problems on the web site, then I will work with Lisa via email during the day to take care of any major problems. When I get home, I kiss my wife and take my dinner upstairs, where I spend the next 4 to 6 hours working on the web site, my weekends are consumed with working on Expansions web site tasks and taping the web shows (which by the way are managed on a separate Flash Communication Server).
Unfortunately this does not give us much time to work on everything we would like to, let alone everything that is being requested from Members and Guests. We are looking for help, but that is a problem too, we have had a lot of trust issues these past couple of years, and are very careful about who we let do any work for us.
Regardless, we are reacting to everything we can, and will continue to do whatever it takes to keep the site up and running.
This weekend, we moved the entire Expansions site, main and forums to a new dedicated server. There is a lot more cost involved but we now control our own server. If we have problems in the future, it will be because of what we have done, not what others have done. We have also put up a new firewall and email server, all of this is working now. We have a couple of small issues, but we expect those to be resolved shortly.
I appreciate everyone's support for Expansions, and we will continue to do what we to support you as well.
Kind Regards,
Robert
