Please accept my sincerest apologies for the site being down most of the day.
As it turns out, record breaking traffic isn’t always what it’s cracked up to be. Here’s what happened….
Yesterday afternoon I wrote this post about the Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day. To my complete surprise it took off. Big time. More than anything I’ve ever posted.
I had about 50,000 hits in the first 5 hours. As it turns out, that is too much traffic for the shared server I am on through my web hosting company. So, they “temporarily suspended the site” in order to save their servers. Once they put the site back up, however, the crazy traffic just continued. Not long after that, the post had been viewed over 100,000 times. Sometime around 3am this morning that number shot WAY up to around 650,000 views AN HOUR as the result of what was most likely a “denial of service” attack.
Fortunately, the web hosting company was able/willing to get things back up and running. But, once again, the traffic was too much for their servers and around 1pm on Thursday they once again “temporarily suspended” the site. After talking with one of their systems administrators they recommended finding a new web hosting company that could handle the increase in traffic.
And that’s where the real fun began.
To make a long story short I bounced around a couple of different web hosting companies, but due to technical incompatibilities I couldn’t get the site back up or if I could it was absent all of my photos and my entire subscriber list.
So, after crawling back on my hands and knees and begging my original web host to let be back in with them, I finally, after 10 hours on and off the phone with tech support, have the site back up and running.
The one catch, however, was that I had to delete my old theme, the template that gave the site its particular look. Apparently that particular theme is especially vulnerable to hacks. My site has apparently been hacked several times because of that theme and their condition for re-hosting me was that I deleted the theme immediately.
So, all that to say I’m finally back up and running, but things obviously look a bit different. They will look different once again in the very near future as soon as a find a suitable replacement theme. The one you see now is just a temporary replacement, as I am, frankly, exhausted from dealing with this and am going to bed.
Before I do, I just want to once again express my sincerest apologies for the unintentional disappearing act and I want to especially say thank you to everyone that was kind enough to share the Chick-Fil-A post on Facebook. I genuinely appreciate all of your support and the kind words you have spoken about both me and the post on your Facebook wall and elsewhere. If you have friends that you shared it with, but weren’t able to read it, please let them know what happened and extend my apologies to them as well.
Anyway, that’s about it. I just wanted to let you all know what happened and qualm your fears that I had disappeared forever because we both know you stay up late at night worrying about whether or not The American Jesus is up and running. 
Grace and peace,
Zack Hunt
