Website Drama

So here’s a heads-up for regular readers (all three of you) and the sitch in a nutshell.

Six weeks ago I was notified by my host–where I have been for several years without a problem–that there was a huge spike in resource usage and I had to fix it, with no direction how to do so. Every forty-eight hours, the same message, just boilerplate responses and nothing I was doing seemed to be working.

Eventually, after a lot of arguing and bullshit and threats, I seemed to be handed off to a far more helpful tech, but I still have to do all this shit on my own and it doesn’t seem to be working. My legit website traffic is just a handful of people, not enough to be causing this CPU usage, which I guess points to bots/crawlers/etc. I have a few queries in about it, and I’m hoping to try CloudFlare, but I’m doubtful at this point that anything will come of it.

My stuff is backed up, at least. Indigo Chick Designs is hosted separately right here, which is about all I care about since it’s the bulk of my income right now.

I’ve disabled various plugins, like my online shop. For now, if you want to buy ebooks direct, you can head here. If for some reason you want to buy a signed print copy of River for someone for Christmas, drop me a line about it–you can pay through PayPal.

I’ve also switched to a simpler theme I’m hoping will load a little faster, which is why things look different.

I’ve already deleted the Soulless serial database, and I will likely be deleting others, like Children of the Apocalypse and Curio Killed the Cat. I’ll add the complete PDF files for CotA 1 & 2 and CKtC here for download. The serials still get a lot of traffic but there’s been virtually no crossover between freebie readers and paying customers anyway (sorry, y’all, but it’s true) and I’m hoping if I basically just torch everything non-essential, that might bring things down enough.

If not, well…

I’m paid up with my host until September and I can’t afford to move right now. And the fact is, the whole situation isn’t good for my health.

I’ve gone weeks without sleeping, I’ve had to take meds for my anxiety often a couple of days in a row (when normally I break down and take it once a month), and I know this is going to make me sick again if it keeps up. I have a huge lull in freelance work right now so I was hoping to get some writing done, and instead I have spent all my time for the past week learning Tech Speak and trying to understand .htaccess and caches and crawlers and all this shit without much luck.

So in another week or so, I guess the site might be gone?

It stressed me out for a while. Now? Meh. Again, my traffic is low anyway, and a good half those “legit” people are pirates. Maybe I can get my domain to point at just a list of my books or something in the meantime. But I’ve already been in a debilitating depressive episode for eight months, I am a mess of tears and doom-spirals daily already. I don’t need this bullshit; it’s just a website and not worth me getting sick over.

If this comes to pass (IF!), it might be months before things are back again, so if you’re worried about missing a book release (AHAHAHA), I’ve got two different newsletters you can sign up for, which I’ll post below.

For sure, I’ll see you on Twitter, and can try to catch up on Facebook more, ‘kay?  (Also, fan-types, you can join Alchemy Red and talk with me, too.)