MamaPop: What Happened

So now that things have calmed down (well, a little) around these parts, I thought I owed it to all of you, as well as to my own sanity, to try to explain a little about what's transpired over the past few days.

Hold onto your freakin' hats, folks.

Before I do though, I need to send out a couple shout-outs to some folks who have quite literally saved the collective ass of MamaPop (the collective ass of MamaPop will be available for interviews, dinner, cocktails, and tight leather pants fittings following this briefing (ha! BRIEFING! GEDDIT?!)). These ass-savers include the whole of SixApart, but Mister Anil Dash in particular, who has been personally subjected to an endless barrage of emails, text messages and IMs from me over the past couple of days (most starting with the word: HALP!). He and the rest of the TypePad peoples have been just unbelievably helpful, responsive, and generous with their time and energy, and there are no words of thanks big enough.

Also, I need to send out a big wet MamaPop tongue-kiss to Jonathan of Federated Media, who is -- as we speak -- slogging through the remains of MamaPop's archives and attempting to reconstruct those and get them migrated over to TypePad. Jonathan, we heart you.

So. To quote David Byrne, How did I (we) get here?

Honestly? I still don't have a really good handle on all of it, but I'll tell you what I know (in handy bullet form! Because have I yet mentioned that my head exploded about 24 hours ago, and that forming complete, coherent sentences at this point is, well, hard?):

• MamaPop has been growing. A lot. Last month we doubled our traffic, which, you know, should be a good thing. And it was, until this week's events.
• Our host for the site clearly was not prepared to deal with the new levels of traffic, for whatever reason (I still don't understand why, on the technical side of things, they couldn't handle it, but obviously that's beyond my ken anyway).
• On Monday we had our highest single traffic day ever, and were set to exceed that on Tuesday when I last checked sometime around Noon.
• I went to pick up my daughter at school, and when I returned home (maybe around 1:30pm on Tuesday?), I was greeted with a mountain of emails from people asking why MamaPop was down, along with a single email from our host saying: "Hi, we took your site down because it was threatening to crash our server." No warning. Just suddenly POOF. Gone.
• This is about when I began alternately speaking in tongues and screaming expletives.
• In between the babble and expletive-spewing, I tried to do a variety of on-the-fly things to reduce MamaPop's load on our server to appease our host, to no avail.
• Finally, I received a rather bitchy email from our host telling me 1) they weren't putting the site back up, 2) clearly we were not cut out for shared hosting, and 3) there was a month wait for dedicated hosting SO GOOD LUCK.
• This is about when I started crying.

After the crying and some fortifying sushi, I chatted with Danielle of Celebrity Baby Blog, and she reminded me that HEY, her site gets a buttload of traffic and she's on TypePad! And since I'd had some peripheral dealings with Anil over the years, I decided to shoot him an email, basically shamelessly begging for help. The subject line read "Emergency MamaPop situation". And within an hour he responded, saying What do you need? How can we help? and Let's do this thing! An angel from heaven, my friends.

Since then its been a lot of heavy code lifting and technical rigmarole -- stuff probably none of you would be much interested in, and I don't blame you. Suffice it to say I've quite literally spent every waking moment for the past two days dealing with the fallout and trying to reconstruct the site as it once was. I never, EVER imagined doing something like this would be so difficult or involved, and without the help of those I've mentioned here there is quite literally no way in hell we'd be back up and running by now, as we are.

I'd like to come up with some sort of Grand Concluding Statement or Lesson here for y'all, but frankly my brain is FRIED, and abstract, creative thinking is a bit beyond me at this point. But I will say that, if anything, this experience has really made me value the human faces behind the internets, as people are truly what have carried us through this, not stupid code.

To everyone who helped, who offered assistance, who wrote me expressing support and sympathy and their love for MamaPop: thanks is not enough, but for the time being it must suffice. So, you know, thanks.

WE'RE BACK, BETCHES!