[RTC List] Fw: Re Happy Holiday Wishes from Cole Machado

[William Van Hefner]

Cole,

Just curious... What was the name of the ISP you ran? Shared servers are
never a good idea for websites that generate even a moderate amount of
traffic. Those server farms are built for maximum return on profit, not
maximum reliability.

There are at least a couple of wireless providers (i.e. 101netlink.com) in
Humboldt that can provide a decent amount of redundancy for regular
network connectivity that relies upon the single fiber connection here. I
know of no plans to install fiber along Highway 299. One provider is
rumored to be running a path along Highway 36 though. There have been no
capacity issues in Humboldt County I know of since a few weeks following
the installation of the new fiber route.

To me, the biggest irony of the "Internet problem" in Humboldt County is
the fact that our elected representatives are all too willing to waste
hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer's money in order to continue
"studying" the situation. Quite frankly, there is nothing important to
learn from any new "study" that isn't already common knowledge to many of
us on this list. For all of the money we are spending on these studies, we
could actually BUILD a redundant wireless network that could satisfy most
of the County's Internet demand. Of course, if that happened, there would
be no more money to spend on expensive studies or local consultants. We
wouldn't need politicians to suck-up to for help. Non-profits wouldn't be
needed to help "solve" (or study) the problem or lobby on our behalf.

Basically, there is too much money and political power at stake to disrupt
the current status-quo, which is entirely dependent upon there continually
being a "problem" to solve. No problem means no funding for "problem
solvers", and no political leverage for those representatives who keep
promising to make things better. I will go out on a limb here and bet that
none of these studies will ever result in anything that remotely resembles
action. The real solutions will almost certainly come from private
businesses who are willing to put their own money at stake in order to
fulfill consumer demand.


-- 
William Van Hefner - President
Vantek Communications, Inc.
707.476.0833 ph
e-mail: vantek at humboldtonline.com



On Fri, December 26, 2008 3:40 am, Cole Machado wrote:
> Its frustrating living in an area that only has the one fiber
> optic line. I haven't heard anything in a while about it.  but when is that
> other fiber line going to come in across 299. we need back up. Its
> frustrating being cut off from the rest of the world when the line goes
> down. Yeah it hasn't happened for a while it seems like but those times
> that it did. It made me decide to never host a website in Humboldtcounty
> again until we get redundancy.
>
> The site JTI was getting so many hits on that weekend. Over 1,000,000
> people attended our rally the following Saturday so if you could imagine
> a lot of people were talking about it on myspace, facebook, blogs, emails,
> twitter, etc...  and then they were visiting the website. I didn't deal
> directly with the web host for JTI. But I know they kept having to make
> the account bigger and bigger on the shared server until they finally
> moved it over to its own dedicated server.
>
> jointheimpact.com is on its own dedicated server.. then the wiki wetpaint
> is on another one.. the wiki is jointheimpact.wetpaint.com
>
> Humboldt county was never really seriously looked at because I couldn't
> give a good recommendation of a reliable web host in the area. Even when
> I had my hosting company here in Humboldt it
> was scary when ever the fiber optic line got "cut". yeah it may not seem
> like long but even if we had to be down for an hour it made our company
> look bad.
>
> Humboldt County needs to get its act together with fiber optics and have
> MORE lines. The silliness that had been happening with Sudenlink a while
> ago. I havent heard many complants on the list about it for a while. So I
> guess they got all the problems fixed. If i remember correctly it was
> something like they couldn't get any more bandwidth. It hurts our small
> businesses when we can have good communication infrastructure in place to
> run them. This was the main reason I had to sell my local ISP and web
> hosting company. I plan on rebuilding a we bhost in the future but I
> don't think it will be based in Humboldt county in the near future.
>
> Just some of my thoughts!
>
>
>
> ___________________________________________________________________
> ¸..·*´¨¨~-:¦:-
> ¸.·´ ..·´¨¨))
> ((¸¸.·´ ..·´ *-:¦:- Cole J. Machado-:¦:-
> -:¦:- ((¸¸.·´* Read my blog at www.colemachado.com
> Phone: 707-442-5555 Fax: 612-545-3509
>
>
>
> President & CEO, The Machado Group www.machadogroup.com
> Northern California Regional & California Statewide Liaison, Join the
> Impact www.jointheimpact.com
> Founder & Community Organizer, Impact Humboldt & Join the Impact Humboldt
> www.impacthumboldt.com Founder & Community Organizer, 707 Progressive
> www.707progressive.ning.com Member of the Board of Directors, Humboldt
> Pride www.humboldtpride.org
> Please consider the environment before printing this email.
> This e-mail may contain Company proprietary information intended for the
> sole use of the recipient(s). Any use by others is prohibited. If you are
> not the intended recipient, please contact the sender and delete all
> copies of the message.
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: William Van Hefner <vantek at humboldtonline.com>
> To: list at redwoodtech.org
> Sent: Friday, December 26, 2008 3:17:42 AM
> Subject: Re: [RTC List] Fw: Re  Happy Holiday Wishes from Cole Machado
>
>
> Are you saying that there are no suitable or reliable hosting companies
> in Humboldt County? That seems pretty harsh. Did you ever consider just
> setting up your own server and feed?
>
> Servers don't just "crash" because there are too many people trying to
> get to a website, at least not if they are managed correctly. It sounds
> like you were probably using a shared hosting account or that the server
> hardware/software was mismanaged. There has to be some underlying
> TECHNICAL explanation for the failure. What did the error logs tell you?
> What kind of OS, software and backend apps are you running?
>
>
> 15,000 total users seems well within the limits of an average web server
> these days, especially if the site was based upon something as simple as a
>  Wiki. I've had sites with twice as many users on machines that would be
> obsolete by today's standards.
>
>
>
> William Van Hefner - President
> Vantek Communications, Inc.
> e-mail: vantek at humboldtonline.com
>
>
>
> On Fri, December 26, 2008 12:19 am, Cole Machado wrote:
>
>> To see more about how Join the Impact got started and our server
>> emergency/issues we experienced when we first went live on Friday Nov
>> 7th
>> read our wikipedia article.  Basicly over that weekend we had so many
>> people visiting our site it kept crashing many times. Such a movement
>> like our spread like wildfire on the net. Our server was donated over
>> that weekend by a company in Seattle called Hostdango. They kept having
>> to up our account untill they gave us a dedicated server. They are a
>> small local company They are a LGBT Friendly company. They are a good
>> business to support if you like us couldn't find suitable, dependable
>> hosting provider in Humboldt County.
>>
>> Support OUR Support - Hostdango.com is offering 20% off to 100 LGBTQ
>> friendly sites. Use Coupon Code IMPACT
>>
>> * It has been amazing the amount of traffic the sites has been getting.
>>
>>
>>
>> The wiki is hosted by a company called Wet Paint they are amazing. If
>> you are in the market for a good wiki community host that is free and
>> pretty easy to use! Check out www.wetpaint.com they are also based in
>> Seattle
>> and are LGBT friendly. We have over 15,000 users on our wetpaint site
>> http://jointheimpact.wetpaint.com
>>
>>
>>
>> The wetpaint wiki is where we were able to organize in less than a week
>>  our volunteer city organizers in over 400 cities and 10 countries for
>> our National Day of Protest on 11-15-08. Locally we had about 700 people
>> show up to the Courthouse. Nationwide we had an estiamted 1 Million
>> people join us at the same time all across the world. We are using the
>> wiki community to organize our next big event the National DOMA Protest
>> on 1/10 where we plan to get 1 million signatures on a letter to
>> President
>> Elect Obama reminding him of his promises he has made to the LGBT
>> community. We will then deliver the letter to him on Day 1.
>>
>>
>> *
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________________________________
>> __
>> __________
>> ¸..·*´¨¨~-:¦:-
>> ¸.·´ ..·´¨¨))
>> ((¸¸.·´ ..·´ *-:¦:- Cole J. Machado-:¦:-
>> -:¦:- ((¸¸.·´* Read my blog at www.colemachado.com
>> Phone: 707-442-5555 Fax: 612-545-3509
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> President & CEO, The Machado Group www.machadogroup.com
>> Northern California Regional & California Statewide Liaison, Join the
>> Impact www.jointheimpact.com
>> Founder & Community Organizer, Impact Humboldt & Join the Impact
>> Humboldt
>> www.impacthumboldt.com Founder & Community Organizer, 707 Progressive
>> www.707progressive.ning.com Member of the Board of Directors, Humboldt
>> Pride www.humboldtpride.org
>> Please consider the environment before printing this email.
>> This e-mail may contain Company proprietary information intended for the
>>  sole use of the recipient(s). Any use by others is prohibited. If you
>> are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender and delete all
>>  copies of the message.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ________________________________
>> From: William Van Hefner <vantek at humboldtonline.com>
>> To: list at redwoodtech.org
>> Sent: Thursday, December 25, 2008 11:51:58 PM
>> Subject: Re: [RTC List] Fw: Re  Happy Holiday Wishes from Cole Machado
>>
>>
>>
>> Mr. Machado,
>>
>>
>>
>> 1. I have offered absolutely no personal opinions about anything for
>> you (or anyone) to disagree with.
>>
>>
>>
>> 2. The only matter in question was the fact that your post was
>> off-topic and (as you, yourself stated) shouldn't have been sent to the
>> listserv in the first place. You offered an apology for the accidental
>> mailing. I'm fine with that, personally. Mistakes happen, especially
>> with Yahoo! mail.
>>
>>
>> List-Id: "This is a discussion list for tech topics on the north
>> coast."
>>
>>
>> Let's please just keep the list on-topic and civil. I do apologize if
>> the crack about Craigslist upset you. It was sarcasm, which does not
>> always translate well to the written word. I hope that you take
>> advantage of the listserv as often as possible to contribute your input
>> on Humboldt County-related tech and broadband matters.
>>
>>
>>
>> Best of luck with your non-profit. Congratulations on the dedicated
>> server. You might want to let us know how it is you cope with the
>> unreliability of Internet connectivity on the North Coast and how it
>> affects your server operation and choice of co-location facilities.
>> Merry
>> Christmas.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> William Van Hefner - President
>> Vantek Communications, Inc.
>> e-mail: vantek at humboldtonline.com
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, December 25, 2008 9:14 pm, Cole Machado wrote:
>>
>>
>>> William Van Hefner:
>>> Sorry it was an accident. the email went to everyone in my
>>> address book the RTC listserv has a spot in my address book, as it has
>>>  since I joined back in 2001. So it went there by accident.
>>>
>>>
>>> I hope you are having a Happy Holiday. That was the gist of my
>>> message. I
>>> am sorry if it offended you.
>>>
>>> Also a main part of my post was about the non-profit, Join the Impact
>>>  www.JoinTheImpact.com and Impact Humboldt www.ImpactHumboldt.com I
>>> am involved with. Our non-proit uses technology 99% of the time to
>>> communicate and run. We use a wiki and have a dedicated server for
>>> god sake with 15,000 users. Again I am sorry if the option of 60% of
>>> Humboldt
>>> County residents disagrees with yours and you attempt try to censor
>>> other members of the RTC.
>>>
>>> I find your acts delporable. I may find need to blog about this
>>> tomorrow if I dont find other suitable content. If I do I will be
>>> quoting the email you sent me.
>>> _____________________________________________________________________
>>> __
>>> __
>>> __________
>>> ¸..·*´¨¨~-:¦:-
>>> ¸.·´ ..·´¨¨))
>>> ((¸¸.·´ ..·´ *-:¦:- Cole J. Machado-:¦:-
>>> -:¦:- ((¸¸.·´* Read my blog at www.colemachado.com
>>> Phone: 707-442-5555 Fax: 612-545-3509
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> President & CEO, The Machado Group www.machadogroup.com
>>> Northern California Regional & California Statewide Liaison, Join the
>>> Impact www.jointheimpact.com
>>> Founder & Community Organizer, Impact Humboldt & Join the Impact
>>> Humboldt
>>> www.impacthumboldt.com Founder & Community Organizer, 707 Progressive
>>> www.707progressive.ning.com Member of the Board of Directors,
>>> Humboldt
>>> Pride www.humboldtpride.org
>>> Please consider the environment before printing this email.
>>> This e-mail may contain Company proprietary information intended for
>>> the sole use of the recipient(s). Any use by others is prohibited. If
>>> you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender and
>>> delete all copies of the message.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ________________________________
>>> From: William Van Hefner <vantek at humboldtonline.com>
>>> To: list at redwoodtech.org
>>> Sent: Thursday, December 25, 2008 7:19:34 PM
>>> Subject: Re: [RTC List] Happy Holiday Wishes from Cole Machado
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Cole Machado,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Can we please keep politics, religion, and personal matters OFF of
>>> the RTC
>>> mailing list? If you just want to stir up trouble, take it to the
>>> Rants
>>> and Raves section of Craigslist. This really is not the appropriate
>>> venue for anything other than the discussion of technology as it
>>> applies to business, residents and local commerce in Northern
>>> California, with a
>>> particular focus on how it affects small to medium local businesses.
>>>
>>>
>>> William Van Hefner - President
>>>
>
>