Last Tuesday all my websites broke. For about an hour, nobody could get to any of them. I host all my sites on the same computer, and on Tuesday I just got too many visitors.
ChurchStageDesignIdeas.com is currently my biggest source of traffic. It sees around 14,000 views/day. The rest are growing, but most only receive about 1,000 views/day.
Well on Tuesday, my new stock photo site for blogger, saw a big increase in traffic. My friend Dustin Stout (a Google+ expert) wrote a blog post about Mopho.to. He opened the floodgates and sent a bunch of people my way. Great! Except I was completely unprepared for it. My websites broke. And it was all my fault.
You see, I’ve run into problems like this before. I occasionally have big traffic days and see some of the errors I got on Tuesday. I’ve known my websites were near capacity for a few months. I did a few things here and there to alleviate the stress on the computers…but I knew the root problem was still there.
So in a sense, I’ve been hoping my websites don’t grow.
If I’d really wanted them to grow and expected them to grow, I would have split the sites between multiple computers. I would have prepared for this scenario.
Even though I “wanted” them to grow, my actions didn’t prove it. The desire to grow was merely a fantasy, not a reality I was working toward.
How many times do we do that in our own lives or our own projects? We don’t prepare for the dream we have inside us.
- We have a dream to be a missionary to Congo, but we don’t learn French.
- We want our church to grow, but we don’t have the capacity for a 20% increase in attendance one Sunday.
- We want to be a writer, but we aren’t learning the craft.
Tuesday was a wakeup call for me. I’ve taken steps to make room for growth. I’m taking this seriously.
Are you taking your dream seriously?
so you host them yourself on your own servers?? seems like a big task!! just curious!
Nope. Haha. Just tried to remove technical jargon for any of my non web-savvy readers. 🙂
ic! so who do you host with?
I use a company called HostGator. They’re Austin based.
i wanted to maybe do stand up comedy some day. i started writing bits. When my pastor asked me to do it for the first time at an event we were hosting, i was ready! And I didn’t suck too bad! hooray.
that’s why you’re living the dream, my friend 🙂
We host with host gator too. That was a rough day. We are currently looking 🙂
Dustin is the best G+ guy on the planet! Great guy indeed.
This post came at the right time! Thanks for keeping it real.
Glad it was timed well for you 🙂