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How Not To Run a Campaign Website
Soong writes "The blogsphere has been going crazy today about the technical difficulties being experienced by the Joe Lieberman for CT Senator web site, joe2006.com. MyDD outlines the story so far and has continuing updates. A reader at DailyKos digs deeper and finds some shamefully exposed ports. A front page story there has the money quote: 'Joe's site shares one server with 73 other sites. They pay $15/month for an overcrowded server, and then they blame others when it goes down?' kos also mentions that 'My hosting bill is now over $7K per month.' While this has immediate consequences for Joe Lieberman's campaign since his site went down Sunday night/Monday morning and the election is today, it makes me curious to see an expose on what exactly we're getting from various vendors when we buy into sub $100/month hosting plans."
It's a series of tubes. Tangled up tubes. Those democrats went and treated it like a truck...you can't do that! It's not something you can just dump things into. It's just tubes.
The fact that Joe Lieberman couldn't keep his website running is a good metaphor for why he lost this challenge by someone who even a few months ago was a nobody.
I think it's particularly interesting that political websites all across the US have been sluggish and crash-happy for most of the day. The amount of interest in this single campaign (a primary, ffs!) crashed not only Joe Lieberman's site, but forced Kos to run a stripped down front page, completely b0rked the official results page, and has slowed down just about any place with breaking news about this race.
I know it's inane to speak of the Power of the Web. The web's not doing anything; it's just people doing what they've always done - showing curiousity whenever something catches their interest. The difference here is that the medium has changed, and this particular medium has created the ability to generate political clout for those who know how to use it. I don't mean that in the Goebbels 'Big Lie' sense - quite the opposite. This campaign in particular has shown that on the Internet, all lies are shallow. And that's a direct challenge to American Politics as it's practised today.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
No -- it really doesn't take a lot to put up a website. It doesn't even take any kind of admin at all -- competent or no. Just like they'll let anyone with a basic driver's license rent and drive a 26' cargo truck, they'll let anyone with a credit card buy a domain name and rent server space. Is it a good idea? No. Does it happen? Constantly.
...of course, blaming these problems on the opposition is SOP for any politician's minions these days, it would seem.
$15 is high-budget stuff for a lot of these folks. (Heck, I have several domains sitting on an old Pentium Pro box on a friend's static-IP DSL connection. Websites can be -- and are -- done on the cheap all the time.)
I find it quite easy to believe that using such a low-end server was an oversight by an underpaid or volunteer staffer who just didn't know better -- or didn't think.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
I you use enough bandwidth, you will get a $7K bill. What the author was saying is that he has a $7K monthly bill every month and expects it.
If you think you can cheap out and push terabytes for nothing, you will quickly find out that free lunches are hard to find anymore.
Now exactly how youtube.com stays in business, I don't get.
Personally, I have to poo-poo the media on this. The Leiberman's website goes down, the liberal blogosphere takes notice and investigates almost in real time. One notable fact uncovered was other domains on the same box were serving pages just fine. This more or less rules out a denial of service which would have brought down the entire machine.
Hours later CNN and others are running stories with the Leiberman campaign accusing Lamont of unethical behavior. Give me a break! What a free pass CNN gives to Lieberman for a late smear. Two sides to a story (i'll accept the premise) perhaps, but one is obviously using the chance (perhaps a 'wired' one at that) for a cheapshot with no time on the clock. Reporters and editors should check with their local geek before becoming such avoidable pawns in a serious contest about the future of the USA.
Fortunately, it appears this didn't push the election.
The Planet is actually one of the largest providers of dedicated servers in the world and has quite a reputation for quality. They're not cheap either - no sub-$100 dedicated boxes from them...
Democrats saw Leiberman as too close to President George W. Bush, not necessarily the Republican party. Realize this election is all about the lack of _faith_ this country has for Mr. Bush and friends right now. If you are seen as an enabler of this administration's policies, you are vulnerable. This pro-Lamont outcome is striking fear into certain Republicans who don't sit in clearly gerrymandered districts (which is a serious cancer on democracy spreading throughout this nation so _wake up_). Don't expect a large volume of changes in either house of Congress due this incumbency stranglehold/advantage, but perhaps enough to wrestle control of the direction of the country from the President back to Congress. As the founders intended (very slowly/deliberately).
I just clicked on the link and I got the following (hilarious) text:
UPDATE ON THE ATTACK ON THE LIEBERMAN CAMPAIGN WEBSITE
STATEMENT FROM SEAN SMITH: "For the past 24 hours the Friends for Joe Lieberman's website and email has been totally disrupted and disabled, we believe that this is the result of a coordinated attack by our political opponents. The campaign has notified the US Attorney and the Connecticut Chief State's Attorney and the campaign will be filing a formal complaint reflecting our concerns. The campaign has also notified the State Attorney General Dick Blumenthal for his review."
"We call on Ned Lamont to make an unqualified statement denouncing this kind of dirty campaign trick and to demand whoever is responsible to cease and desist immediately. Any attempt to suppress voter participation and undermine the voting process on Election Day is deplorable and has no place in our democracy."
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Even though I know feeding the trolls is a lousy idea, here I go again..
The reason that this election is such a big deal is that a very senior senator is in a very tight race with someone from his own party. The democratic voters in Connecticut are tired of having Bush's lapdog taking up their seat in the senate. I wouldn't ordinarily throw names like that around, but what else do you call some who's voting record deviates from the President's wishes in less than 1 percent of his votes? If he was smart, he would have switched parties before this election. It's not unheard of, and he'd actually have a chance at winning. His opponent, Ned Lamont, has a lot of big groups behind him, including MoveOn.org. Lieberman is so afraid of losing his seat that they brought out the big dogs and had Bill Clinton campaigning for him in Connecticut. This is not your average race.
You may be right about the democrats saying 'goodbye to '08' though. This race definitely shows that democratic voters are tired of the democrats attempting to be republicans. Democrats, and even republicans, that want to win this fall will need to go against the President and distance themselves from him.
Aero
Please stop hurting America -- Jon Stewart
Given the choice between incompetence and conspiracy/enemy action,
99% of the time its going to be incompetence.
I vote incompetence.
So here are a bunch of loyal Democrats that turn to Sen. Lieberman's website in order to show their support, get tips on registering/voting, donate some time or money, even. The site is 'friend-dotted', and what does Joe do?
Does he move site to a better server? Does he upgrade the hosting plan? No, he turns to his base and says (paraphrasing here) Fuck you assholes for crashing my website; you all hate me; the other guy is a jerk that sicced yall on my tubes. Then he demands Lamont cry 'I am not a thief' over the incident.
I am not a Democrat, but I am amazed at how Sen. Lieberman keeps biting the Koolaid base hand that feeds him.
I guess if you give fuck you to your base, the base lobs that fuck you right back at ya. Hence his loss today.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Once upon a time, I got my own website. After months of searching and trying a bunch of discount hosts that gave me less than I paid for, I came across phpwebhosting.com and all was good. While only $10 a month, it provide me with great reliable hosting and even better tech support. That was in 1998. By 2003 I had moved all of my client's sites to phpwebhosting.com and everything was still good. Of course there were now cheaper discount hosts (some for as low as $4 a month!), but I stayed with phpwebhosting.com b/c of the great past and present service.
Then 2004 arrived. AOL and other ISPs started blocking email sent from phpwebhosting.com servers. I managed to work around the problem, but I had no idea what had happened in the background. Then one day, I noticed that instead of one of my domains going to phpwebhosting.com's server, it was going to theplanet.com's. After more research it appeared that theplanet.com had taken over phpwebhosting.com, or at the very least phpwebhosting.com was just reselling theplanet.com's stuff.
At the end of 2004 things started to turn bad. One client's site was down for 5-6 hours a day for an entire week. No warning, no appology, and no responce to the trouble ticket. Then all of the clients started to be blocked again by AOL. Then worse my personal account could not recieve email. Since all of this started just before X-mas, I gave them a week to reply to the trouble ticket (in the past it was normally only 24hr or less). Then I raised the level of the ticket and asked for an update. Since New Years was just around the corner, I gave them another week to do something. Nothing happened. At this point, I started to get phone calls from people asking why my email was bouncing. The ticket was already at the emergency level, so I again asked for an update. Still nothing by the end of the first week in Jan.
I began the really annoying task of seeking out a new webhost. Meanwhile the clock was ticking on the trouble ticket. The 2nd week in Jan was gone and I had found the place I would move some of my clients (other's I decided to set up on their own servers). The end of Jan, I finally moved the last of my domains from phpwebhosting.com (which I think is now controlled by theplanet.com). Over a month had gone by and there was still no answer to the trouble ticket.
I can only say that for many years phpwebhosting.com was great and that only after theplanet.com somehow became involved with them did the server go down hill. It must be theplanet.com's fault. Had the Friends of Joe Lieberman knew about this, I'm sure they would have chosen a better discount webhost.
Joe is already pnwed by the neo-cons.