Just checking in to apologise if you couldn’t reach UPCZilla over the last 24 hours. A server misconfiguration, possibly coupled with some kind of DDoS attack, caused our server to completely fail, and as luck would have it nobody noticed for almost a day – seemingly our emergency notification also failed. Sigh… So it’s back …
We did it – we made 2,000,000 UPCs! Let’s make it clear – quality is the goal on UPCZilla, not quantity. We could probably have dumped huge numbers of UPCs into our database a long time ago, but we prefer a slow and steady approach. There are technical issues to address, we need to make …
Recently UPCZilla saw a major drop in traffic from Google. We quickly realised it was very likely due to the large number of soft 404s the Googlebot was finding, as well as excessive 500 errors due to some unoptimised database queries causing MySQL to hang when traffic was heavy. The soft 404s, it turned out, …
This won’t interest most visitors to this site, but I had to post it somewhere as it will help someone out there, so it’s filed under Techie stuff. A bout of heavy Google crawling of the site forced me to look at some of our slow database queries, which could be overlooked when we had …