So What Happened to The Penguin?

[ThePenguin]

On Wednesday, October 8th I received a note from the company that hosts The Penguin, informing me that my site was once again using too many resources and negatively affecting the other accounts on the semi-dedicated server. If the drain on the server was not decreased immediately, the site would be suspended. Unfortunately, this has happened many times in the past and I have continuously shuffled and modified the site to try to decrease the amount of server resources and bandwidth it consumes. However, due to the large amount of material on The Penguin, the popularity of the band since the release of the new album, and the current SYW tour, there is only so much that I can do. I turned on the load limiting options on The Ledge hoping that would be enough-- this is what causes the “server busy” messages when more than 50 simultaneous visitors are on the boards or even the server load spikes. It cannot, however, limit visitors on the remainder of The Penguin site, which receives the majority of the traffic. On Thursday, October 9th, I had to leave for a business trip in San Diego. I was able to log on to the internet on October 10th and found the site to be shut down. Ironically, that was Fleetwood Mac Day.

When I arrived back home on Sunday evening, Bob Welch called about ten minutes after I walked in the door. At the time I was definitely leaning towards closing the site, and told him I would reach a decision later in the week and would try to get something posted at www.fleetwoodmac.net.

In order to continue the site, my host wanted me to upgrade from their semi-dedicated plan to a dedicated server. The cost is about three times what I was currently paying per month. I am sure that it comes as no surprise to anyone here or visitors to The Penguin that I am not really "into" the site like I was at one time. My life has simply changed. When I started the site in April 1995, I was recently married, a student, and had no children. Now I have two children-- Brittany just turned 7 (also on FM Day) and Benjamin will turn 4 in February (he’s a leap year baby actually!) I also have a very exciting yet demanding job, and am concentrating on building my professional career. Between the kids, work, and Lis, The Penguin just does not have the priority in my life that it once did. I just cannot manage it all and something had to give.

Nevertheless, assembling the Penguin over the past eight and a half years took me an incredible amount of effort, and was aided by the contributions from probably literally hundreds of fans. I am sure that The Penguin has introduced thousands of fans to the world of Fleetwood Mac and has been a very positive force for the band for close to a decade. Although I am certain that I will never go back to working on it as I once did, I would like it to continue if possible online and serve as an archive for FM fans. The costs that I have been paying per month were very difficult for me as a student, but are not so bad right now. Paying three times as much, though, would be a very real drain on our budget. At this time, three generous benefactors have kindly volunteered to split the difference of the increase. The Penguin is now on a dedicated server, and this will hopefully solve all of the technical glitches and interruptions in service that we have experienced at times of very high traffic.

This is also a turning point. As I want to keep the site online and want it to be more continuously updated, this concept conflicts with my lack of time to actually do it. I am going to be recruiting a handful of talented and responsible individuals to take over updating sections of the site. The Penguin used to be THE site for the most current and accurate information on Fleetwood Mac, and it can once again regain that role. If you are interested in volunteering your time, please drop me a note at penguin@fleetwoodmac.net. If you have a website, please send me the URL; I am especially looking for a few people knowledgeable in coding PHP and MySQL databases.

Quite a few people have also asked how they can help financially. Thank you sincerely for your interest. The best way would just be to use the links provided on The Penguin when you make your online purchases for stores like Amazon.com and Ebay. A small portion comes back to the site and it would help to ease the burden on the four of us. I have also added a Paypal donation link on the left side of the Ledge. I posted more information on this option further down in this thread.

In conclusion, I hope this clears up what happened. Here’s to another eight and a half years and beyond.