On Tuesday Dying Van Gogh Records announced that the singer’s official website, edhale.com, is in the process of migrating to a new stronger and more powerful dedicated-server array to handle the increase in traffic and ensuing problems it has been causing. Visitors may have noticed that the website for raconteur lead singer, Ed Hale, of the rock group Transcendence, has been acting funny lately; or at times may not appear to be working at all. The site has been down for extended periods of time over the last four weeks, several times for hours. And at other times the site may appear to be completely inaccessible or it might take forever to load before “timing out.”
“All of this makes sense with Ed’s new solo album [Ballad On Third Avenue] continuing to gain traction in the media,” stated the singer’s publicist Trish Stevens of PR firm Ascot Media. “But one would think they’d bloody be prepared for it. It’s unacceptable if you ask us and it’s making our job a bloody nightmare. There have also been several instances where the website just says “Site Suspended” on its homepage for hours. How is that acceptable?” Stevens goes on to explain that in the last four weeks alone the website’s hosting service, Utah based MidPhase, has told the PR company that the website edhale.com has crashed their servers on six separate occasions with CPU overages up to 90% at their worst due to traffic increases and excessive simultaneous traffic and in some instances the web-hosting company has admitted to “pulling the plug” on the singer and suspending the website temporarily to avoid full system crashes on their shared servers. They have recommended the singer’s record label Dying Van Gogh migrate the artist’s website to a small array of dedicated servers which should be more than enough to avoid any further overages. The move is in process now and should be completed by week’s end.
A Midphase Sales rep named “Brock” stated “It isn’t a question of how many visitors the site is receiving so much as what those visitors are doing while on the site. These days, especially on music related websites, users will stay on a website for much longer periods of time and listen to music or watch videos, which takes up a lot more bandwidth than just reading a blog. Have ten thousand of them all doing it at the same time and this is what is bound to happen. If the traffic continues to increase on edhale.com for instance we just need to be prepared for it and know what type of site it is. Then yes, it’s a no brainer. We can handle it.” Midphase sister company WestHost Servers has been commissioned to fix the indie-rock singer’s problem, but cannot guarantee when they will have the website moved over to the new servers; which leaves the singer and his fans sitting ducks for more down-time or another suspended account at any minute. “Tell me that it’s normal for a web-hosting company not to have a backup plan in case one of their client’s traffic increases. For now all press distribution for Ed has come to a full stop due to this and if you ask me that’s just not fair.”
In the meantime Ascot Media publicist Rodney Foster suggested that now would be a good time to “friend” Hale on Facebook or MySpace until the problem is solved. The latest news, music, videos, tour dates, and status updates all can be had via the singer’s Facebook or MySpace pages. “Increases in traffic to a client’s website are what we get paid to do. But not to crash them! This is a first for us,” commented Foster. “But Ed’s new CD is brilliant and we’re honored to be working with him. I wouldn’t be surprised if this isn’t the last time this happens. Especially with his summer touring schedule now in the works.”
Ascot Media has requested that all Media contact them directly for media requests to avoid experiencing hold ups or bogging down the singer’s website any further until the new servers are in place.
Rodney Foster rfoster@ascotmediagroup.com or 281-324-2180
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