Thank you to everyone who sent me an e-mail. I will NOT be writing back to each of you personally; I have my normal duties of state to do as well as un-scheduled CathInfo maintenance!

It was the first time for this type of "outage". From what I can tell, the "Your Account is Suspended" message came from *My Server*. The first thing I did was check ChantCD.com to see if it was the whole server in trouble -- nope, that site was fine. So that narrowed it down quite a bit.

Remember, CathInfo is self-hosted. That means it's hosted on my own server. So let's just say that limits the "ways" someone could take down the site.

Turns out CathInfo was way over budget for bandwidth, so the system automatically suspended the account. I never told it to do that, of course. You'd think the software would leave suspending an account to be a manual action. Maybe send me an e-mail when an account is over, but leave any punishment to ME, the admin. I don't know if I can make bandwidth simply "unlimited" per month. Why was the bandwidth so high in just the first 3 days of the month? It *might* have been the large video I posted in the Members subforum a couple days ago. I should have seen that coming.

Glad it wasn't something really serious. But that'll get you up in the morning!


P.S. A bunch of you got this totally wrong. You thought this was a "banned" message of some sort. Re-read the wording carefully. The phrases HOSTING PROVIDER and YOUR WEBSITE should be a bit of a clue...

Account Suspended

Please contact your hosting provider to correct issues causing your website to be offline.

For a while I thought that your ISP might have suspended you due to a complaint from the ADL or SPLC, or one of those groups.

Well, since we're not in Soviet Russia (YET!) or postwar crushed Germany, we're not at the point where mere "thoughtcrime" can get your utilities turned off.
Not in America -- not yet.

Notice I said utilities, not "my account" or "my website". When you use a service, it's easy to lose that service when you get "cancelled" or make a major public thoughtcrime. When you depend on MailChimp to send your emails, or some company to host your website -- it's easy for people to complain and the first thing those companies will do is cancel your service. They don't want a headache, much less legal trouble. Your monthly fee just isn't worth it at that point. Companies are in business to make money, not lose it.

But local utilities (electricity, water, gas, sewer, garbage pickup, Internet service) are a different story. They haven't gotten involved in political correctness or Cultural Marxism yet.

Glad you fixed it!
Now if you could fix my email notifications all would be perfect!

For a while I thought that your ISP might have suspended you due to a complaint from the ADL or SPLC, or one of those groups.

My thinking was much the same.

I had no idea what was going on, and it behooved me to pop a quick email, just in case there was some kind of catastrophe with CI.