A comment was posted to a news item regarding this under the last BlurBeta announcement, but due to a bug in the MUCode, no one noticed that the comment was there. So… to find out what was up, read on…
Friday afternoon, BlurBeta posted the following:
08/18/00
We’re back from our unscheduled downtime. Sorry about that. The studio needed our network bandwidth so BlurBeta had to be taken down for a while. We are in the process of upgrading to a faster line, so, hopefully this won’t happen often. Thanx to everyone that offered their help and disk space – your support is greatly appreciated – we will keep in touch if we need the help in the future. We were not able to quickly set up mirrors as we had hoped – many of the links in our pages broke when the site was transferred, so BlurBeta will need some work before we consider using mirrors again.
Webmasters – if you are using bots, crawlers, spiders, whatever, to watch for changes on our site, please limit the amount of automatic scanning you are doing. If possible, try and limit the automatic downloads of our pages to, at most, twice a day – preferably after our studio’s peak hours (around 6pm Pacific) and perhaps in the early am. Also, please focus your attention on our news pages (this News and Updates page and the RayFX Developers Journal) rather than periodically downloading everything from our site to check for changes. We don’t know if bots are part of the problem or not, but anything we can do to keep from saturating our bandwidth will help. Thanx. sk….
To clarify – The network bandwidth was not a render crunch issue – it was in internet bandwidth problem. Blur needed to be able to ftp a lot of data to some clients and the heavy network traffic being generated by BlurBeta and XBox Movie downloads was was maxing out their internet bandwidth. When it comes down to a conflict between giving away free plugins or getting data to paying clients… The site was only offline until the bandwidth was no longer needed, then BlurBeta came back up.
