Dustin M. Wax

One Man’s Opinion is back — for now.

Beginning in October, I started taking on about 1 gigabite of server traffic a day, mostly from referrer spam. My first host shut down the site when it began destabilizing their servers, and to add insult to inury, deleted my files. I’d tell you to stay away from them, but it looks like they just got taken over. Anyway, don’t use MaxiPointServers, and if you see their IT guy around the neighborhood, kick him in the shins. Hard.

I transferred the site to a new host, hoping that the couple weeks downtime would have discouraged the baddies. It didn’t. 5 days later I maxed out my month’s allotment of bandwidth. I took the site down. I tried again in December. 6 days later…

So here I am again. I’ve got a monster of a .htaccess file between myself and the baddies, and I’ve set the site up so that the old domain refers to my CV site. I’ve tried to set it up so that old links will redirect to the new site, but it doesn’t seem to be working, and I can’t remember how all the old URLs were configured so I couldn’t redirect them all anyway. And since the old webhost deleted files from the several months when, unbeknownst to me, my hard disk was failing so I was backing up corrupt data, I lost a lot of posts. And most of the comments. I’ve tried to reconstruct as much as I could from Google’s cache, but… I lost some opinions.

I’ll be keeping an eye on traffic the next few days; hopefully, the precautions I’ve taken will let me keep this site online. Since I couldn’t use this site, I’ve started a new site called ThinkNaughty, exclusively dedicated to material relating to research on sex and gender in the US, for a project I want to start when I clear my plate of my existing work. And I’m still busy at Savage Minds, the anthropology blog. For the most part, this site will be an archive of past work, while I focus myself on more academic pursuits — but who knows? I may find myself needing an outlet for thoughts that don’t have a place at the other two sites.