Stinky Website

Rob writes:

Your website provider stinks! Your server is down all the time. Very
frustrating.

No one finds this more annoying than I. Anyway, it’s Matt Drudge’s fault. When he began linking to my site last year, it started crashing not only my site but other people’s unrelated sites housed on the same server. To avoid this we instituted a policy which limits the number of people who can simultaneously view anything at Ted Rall Online. That means that off hours tend to be pretty easy to get in while peak surfing hours (while slacking on the job, let’s face it) can be dicey.

The best solution would be for me to change servers to a bigger, more expensive, company. But like my other cartoonists and writers, I’m already ambivalent about the effect of this site and therefore reluctant to spend even more money on it. On the one hand, it allows millions of people who don’t live in cities that publish my work in newspapers to read it. But it doesn’t generate much revenue, except when I have a new book out and need to publicize tour dates, etc. Moreover, it may even cost me more money because readers who live in the cities that don’t publish me have zero incentive to write their editors to ask that they pick me up. It’s not just me–cartoons and columns are being read more widely than ever before thanks to the Internet–and paying their creators less than ever. (Believe me, you’d be shocked shocked shocked to learn how little this work pays.)

The bottom line: until this site starts generating more revenue or some angel comes along with a stipend to keep it going, I’m keeping the old cheapie server. And I’m keeping the old 1997-style design until I find an extra $4000 to do a redesign.