A few people have asked me what this message is all about that sometimes appears at the top of the web site: "Our web site will be going down in 3 minutes for a routine reboot. We should only be offline for a few seconds, but this may log you off momentarily. If you're placing an order, please finish up as soon as possible. Sorry for the inconvenience."

Well, twice a day, our web site goes through a quick reboot. It only takes a few seconds, but if you're logged in and watching videos, or if you're in the middle of placing an order, it will cancel your "session variables" and log you out... effectively killing what you were doing.

Why does this happen? Well, our web server is hosted at GoDaddy. It's not a dedicated server, so we share the same physical hardware with other web sites. We just don't have the traffic to merit our own dedicated server (yet) and the one we're on now has been working just fine (knock on wood). However, in order to make sure everything runs smoothly, GoDaddy has each web site scheduled to "reboot" twice a day. This cleans up all of the session variables and essentially gives you a FRESH session... almost like rebooting your computer can kill any misbehaving services or programs that are running in the background.

The problem is that when I built 599CD.com, I designed it to use session variables and all of your user info is stored in them. So every time you log on, your data is loaded into session variables (memory kept on the server). If the session resets, you're logged off. At that time, 10 years ago, we did have our own dedicated web server running at a local company here in Buffalo. I decided that it was better to have a national company like GoDaddy manage my server for me instead of wasting all of my time maintaining it (updates, security, etc.). Now if there's a problem, I just call them and say "FIX IT!"

Now, to get around this problem, in the short term, I'm going to be rewriting the code on the web site so that it relies more on user cookies (data stored on YOUR computer) rather than all session variables. This should prevent the problem from recurring. Right now, it's just an annoyance. Everything is working just fine... but if you see that message pop up, be aware that you might need to log back on in a few minutes. :)

In the LONG run, I've got a complete rewrite of the site planned... if I ever get caught up with my tutorials. That's why my site looks so out of date and lacks "fanciness." I haven't spent a lot of time updating the look. Soon....