The James Logan Courier

Courier Staff Report

The Courier returned to operation today after a five day hiatus, during which the online student newspaper moved to a new webhosting set-up.

"Audience growth at The Courier led us to move to a new web hosting service with a newfangled Virtual Server set-up that we think can handle our traffic," said Courier Advisor Patrick Hannigan. "We hoped the switch to the new set-up would be quick and painless, but it didn't turn out that way."




The move began last Thursday and was mostly complete by this morning. Technicians at The Courier's new webhost, Paintball Hosting, are working to fix a few glitches, Hannigan said.

"We had to move to a new webhost because our bandwidth usage, the amount of information our readers cause to be sent over the internet, spiked from around 50 gigabytes in August to almost 100 gigabytes in September," he said. "This month, we were on pace to move almost 125 gigabytes of information over the intertubes."

"With this move, we think we're ready to handle the current traffic, and more as The Courier's audience grows," Hannigan said. "We hope we can stay with Paintball Hosting for the next few years."

Hannigan said the move is not a reflection on the service at its previous host, Visionhead Technologies. "Visionhead was very good to us and for us, but, unfortunately, we outgrew the shared webhosting service they offer, which has many websites on a single server which share that servers resources. When we got too big, they had to shut us down because we hogged all the server capacity and kept the other sites on the server from operating properly. With this new
Virtual Server set-up offered by Paintball Hosting, that's not a problem anymore."