If you’ve seen this error lately, here’s why. The popularity of four recordings in one week — Robert Forster, two Sigur Ros shows, and The Feelies — has stretched the server to its limit. Our host server limited this site to 1000 concurrent unique connections after the fiasco last October. If you are connection number 1001, you will get the Error 503 message.
There are several possible solutions to this problem, none of which seem feasible at this point. I have discussed an unlimited dedicated server with my host, but unfortunately the cost is quite prohibitive. There is a small cap and any bandwidth and storage above that cap is charged at an alarming rate considering the amount of traffic nyctaper receives. This is not a pay site, will never be a pay site, and will remain free.
This is also an ad-free site. There are plenty of commercial blogs that shill for their advertisers and post irresponsible and inflammatory material to generate traffic. This is not one of those blogs. Due to the popularity of this site we have reached a Page Rank 5 level and get about 10,000 hits a day. As a result, we have received multiple overtures from advertisers and advertising sites which we have rejected. We reject advertising for two main reasons — to remain objective and free from influence, and as a sign of respect to the artists whose music we feature.
We do not expect any quick solution to the server limitation problem. When our two-year package with our current server host expires in May, we expect to look around for a more stable and perhaps higher speed host. In the meantime, the only other solution we can imagine would be a “white knight” — an unlimited free server like the archive.org host.
Until that pie in the sky solution materializes, all we can ask from our faithful readers is patience and discretion. Please only download one or two recordings at a time and don’t hammer the server. On Sunday, there were 73,000 connection attempts from one IP address in Germany and on Monday, there were 900 files downloaded from an IP address at the University of New Orleans Lakefront Campus. nyctaper can not tolerate or survive abuse. We hope that our readers will bear with us and respect the site and its limitations.
Just a clarification. If you get the 503 Error, as the screen indicates its a temporary situation. Give it some time and return and you’ll likely reach the site. This server capacity issue only occurs during peak download periods, like this week when four consecutive popular recordings were uploaded.
And THANK YOU all for the nice emails.