Why Blue MauMau Crashed

"Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded when you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining," says computer philosopher Jef Raskin.  He's right. At Blue MauMau, we have tried hard to build a tough enough shoe that meets your franchise information needs without you even thinking about it. So when the shoe blew out last week, it was unbelievably frustrating for us, to say the least. We worked feverishly both night and day to bring the site back. After no doubt receiving countless error messages of "website exceeds CPU," you have exhibited the patience of a seasoned athlete who truly loves their running shoe, holes and all. We think we have solved the problem and are now building a better shoe. But first here is what happened.

Host Problems

Warning! Boring technical explanations are to follow. Jump down to the "The Future" section at the bottom if this sort of stuff bores you.

Blue MauMau exceeded bandwidth limits in November and December due to too much traffic. So in January the site was switched to a tested host that could handle our increasing bandwidth needs. On January 23, unbeknown to us, our host's systems automatically flipped on a switch that constricted the use of the server's CPU. Our traffic and software needs continued to overload the CPU while we worked for days with the hosting service to figure what happened.

The short of it was that our platform, coupled with our traffic needs, did not work well with our new host.

Denial-of-Service Attack?

Throw into the mix that very early into our search we found a malicious software code not much longer than the phrase, "what's this junk doing here?" It was uploaded by a hacker onto our platform. Such malicious action is a federal crime.

 After looking at the uploaded software, abuse investigators wrote back:

"Normally hackers upload a file like this one and then from the Web they are able to alter your index page and put their content on it to show that it has been hacked. With the shell file they can also delete all of your files if they want."

We cannot fathom who would want to delete files from our site. It should be noted that some files were deleted, but not from a hacker. Our webmaster was backing up the site and then restoring it on Wednesday and then last weekend, leaving time gaps of when some people wrote a post and when we restored our backed-up platform.

There were also unauthorized intense hits to the system by just a few sources that taxed our software and the CPU. Another federal crime. Security measures that block against such intrusions have been implemented.

It is uncertain who would want to devote such malicious efforts to our humble site. But our readers can rest assured that the matter is being pursued.

The Future

The Blue MauMau community will see major upgrades in platform, broadband, security and hardware to make sure that you can access and post to the community without worrying about it going down. By February 5, you should begin to see the fruits of a major hardware upgrade. Software and user interface upgrades will follow in the upcoming weeks.

We started this site with no advertising to make a clean break from existing franchise portals, of which there are some 100 or more. We wanted to show you, the franchise owner and thought-leader, that Blue MauMau was different from anything out there. We weren't just a place for reading advertisement or propoganda. Blue MauMau heard your need for honesty and for franchisee peer participation in order for individual franchisees to more wisely invest, operate and sell franchise(s). 

Since our readership has increased much more quickly than our original projections (we are now ranked the 4th most popular trafficked franchise site out of roughly 900), we are now moving up our schedule to monetize the site in the next quarter in order to pay for the upgrades that will better serve you.  Since Blue MauMau is an open community, or what uses advanced Web 2.0 tools to create a social network and management tools around owning a franchise, the genie is clearly out of the bottle. Franchise insights and data will be contributed by readers such as you. We will continue to build and expand our site's news, forums, tools and security for you to make sure that this is the place that meets your information needs in buying and running a franchise business.

If you like what you see here, and want more (we have many plans), let me know what you want to see (contact me). 

AND please spread the word to franchisees and franchise wannabees.