Folks, we received over 400,000 hits on our site just before 10am on 1/4/10. This amount of traffic crushed our server and we have been working to restore service on a dedicated, thus more stable, server.

When we signed up with this last host, they guaranteed us that they could handle out traffic. January has always been our busiest month at SCDUCKS. For example, last year we had over 18 million hits in the month of January. When the new server reached 400,000 hits in a few hours, it overloaded.

Instead of notifying us and discussing options, they simply suspended our account. Millero and I have been jumping through hoops ever since. I was on the phone with these guys at 5am this morning adding new and exciting words to their vocabularies. Who wants to hunt ducks anyway when you can be on a phone inventing new curse words to insult computer nerds with?

The upshot of this is that we are now on a supposedly dedicated server costing us 10X per month more than we have ever paid, and it SHOULD handle the traffic. I can guarantee you that we will be moving this joint as soon as duck season is over because I am not doing business with an outfit that won't do what it says it will. Shutting the site down without warning, contacting, calling, emailing, smoke signaling, or fucking passenger pigeoning is pretty screwed up.

Sorry for the downtime folks. I am going duck hunting...