hosting company

After years of being involved in administering different online communities, as well as developing the software for them, one thing never stops shocking me. When you get a user that crosses the line and you ban them, or take any action so they can no longer contribute to your online community, they start yelling that you are violating their constitutional right to freedom of speech.

The AP takes a good look at this today:

Say it on the Internet, and you'll find that free speech and other constitutional rights are anything but guaranteed.

Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content that's controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.

When I hear people complain that a site is taking away from someones freedom of speech, I always point to shopping malls. Go into a shopping mall and start saying whatever you feel like. If the management of that mall doesn't like that, they will throw you out. It's private property and they have the right to. The same thing applies to websites. The owners of that website pay for hosting and have to adhere by the terms of a hosting company. That hosting company is also a private business, so in the end it's much like the mall scenario.

So next time you want to go on a rant in the comments section of a blog, just remember that the owner of that blog can stop you from posting, and it's not a "violation of freedom of speech". Instead they are exercising their rights as a business/site owner.

In the past 3 hours, I have received over 3,000 spam attacks. This is causing the server to overload. I have had to temporarily restrict commenting to registered members only and close registration, until this attack stops. Once it does then I will re-open it. My hosting company is looking into the source of these attacks to block all access to the site.

I apologize for the inconvenience this may cause

Lieberman just said in his speech that people can go to his site, joe2006.com, once it has been "unhacked". Well I decided to go to his site and check out if their problems were fixed and interesting enough I got a 503 error. For those who are not up on web server errors, 503 signifies high useage. This is what happens when your site has to much traffic and your hosting company throttles your processor useage. For those who have been reading this blog since I made my move, you will remember those errors as they are the same ones I received when I was on the same server as Joe is now and had only 500-1000 hits per WEEK.

I hit refresh a couple of times and was able to finally get in and this is all his site was showing:

(click image for larger version)

He is still saying his site was hacked, even with his "new" hosting company showing errors that specifically say he is just getting too many hits. Instead of capitalizing on that fact by saying "wow I got a lot of people interested in me", Joe goes to a low level. Joe has decided to make this a political attack and falsley accuse people of attacking his site. Numerous technical people around the internet have tried to advise Joe on this and some even offered him help, as well as server space. He wants to make this into a legal issue now. I hope that when the facts come out that the U.S. Attorney's office decides to tell Joe Lieberman about his false claims and they look at charging him for their time or charge him with filing a false report.

You might get some odd errors while viewing the site today. We have a problem going on with the database. The great people at Lypha (the hosting company which I highly recommend) are working hard to fix it so stay tuned and we will be back shortly.

There are some server problems. The hosting company is working on them as we speak. This means the site could act erratically over the next couple hours. Thanks for your understanding.

As I go through trying to fine tune everything I have noticed a couple small problems with the site.

First off there was a couple days where it was slow loading. This was actually a problem with the hosting company. Thankfully they were quick to remedy the situation. It took a couple days because I was going through making certain it was nothing on my end causing it.

The news items that appeared on the front page (the ones in the box) are no longer there. Well they are but, as you may have noticed, they are now on the top in the "Latest News" section. For those who have visited IntoxiNation for awhile you may remember the hold scrolling headlines I had on the sidebar. Well I have eliminated that. It was nice but caused for a small hangup while it loaded. It also crashed dependent upon what was coming out of news feeds and their was always things we may not have been that concerned about.

The new "Latest News" section is totally controlled by us. Throughout the day as we find articles of interest we will post them there along with one or two sentences about the article. The headline will take you to the actual article and if there are more than one articles about the same subject that are interesting, we will place a link to the other article(s) within that short description. Of course you can comment on the articles here via the comment link.

To view previous News Items, simply click on the News Item category on the left or go to the archive to that date. One small warning. The sites that host the articles don't always keep them up that long. Some only do so for two weeks so the article link may not work after a certain amount of time.