Thank You For Sticking With Bodyguard Careers through Technical Difficulties

You may have noticed over the past few days that it has been exceptionally difficult recently to access Bodyguard Careers.  You’re not alone; many visitors and Bodyguard Careers staff have had the same experience as well.

First of all, the bad news: Due to an unfortunate series of events, the site had intermittent connectivity problems from Saturday through Tuesday of this week.  I was traveling during much of this time (in Iowa of all places, without a computer or Internet) and as a result, I wasn’t able to get the site back up in a timely manner.

We got so much traffic to the site in such a short period of time on Saturday that it nearly killed the server that hosted Bodyguard Careers.  When we chose originally chose our host for this site, we never imagined that we would get so much traffic and that crashing would be a possibility.

Unfortunately, we had to learn the hard way that this was a certain reality, and that we needed to move the site to a more stable hosting infrastructure.  Once this realization set in, two more days were spent making this transition to a new host, and all of the quirks that go along with such a major site change.  Fortunately, as of the time I write this, we feel that the site should be on much stronger footing.

The experience was embarrassing for both myself and Hucky because having a down website in the year 2009 seems highly unprofessional. It also prevented many new visitors from making it to our site who wanted to see what it was all about.  During the downtime of the site, we experienced a sense of helplessness that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

Now, for the good news. With the explanation of what happened out of the way, I think it’s worth mentioning why the server crashed in the first place.  It actually crashed for good reason.  Starting on Saturday, the national broadcast on Fox News had a story profiling Female Bodyguards and how there has recently become a surging demand for female bodyguards.    In that story, our very own Hucky Austin was a featured interviewee!  Even better, in his by-line, it showed the URL for our site underneath his name… a compelling call to action for people to come visit our site.

And they came and they visited!  Within an hour we had a 20x increase in traffic over a normal Saturday.  Within two hours, we were setting all time weekend traffic records.  Then the third hour came, and the site came crashing down.

Unfortunately, while we were trying to get the site back up, the story kept running.  In fact, it ran the entire weekend and was seen by millions of Fox News visitors… all while the site was down.

We were able to get the site back up temporarily on Sunday afternoon, and we actually had a very successful day on Monday… until the site went back down again.  On Tuesday, it was up/down/up/down/up/down/up all day.

Finally on Wednesday everything seems to be running stable.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this won’t ever happen again.

Thanks for sticking with us – we love our readers and your loyalty has really helped us stay focused on this labor of love.  We couldn’t do it without you!

Look for Hucky on your national and local news outlets… I have a feeling this isn’t the last you will be hearing of him.  Hopefully the site won’t break next time.

– Jeff