Beermogul.com, Beer, online games, beer, brand, beer, pop culture, software, beer, web 2.0, beer, Micro ISVs, beer

Thursday, November 16, 2006

I can't play - I'm an alcoholic

I wrote the original BeerMogul code from the ground up. It was a bit of an experiment and a learning process - learning about ASP and learning about web development in general. I was learning as I went, and the result was a bit of a mess technically. As a result the system would experience regular issues - getting stuck in infinite loops, poor database performance due to badly formed queries, general IIS crashes etc.

Once the game became popular it was creating too much load on the shared server - to the point where the daily run of the God Tool would bring the thing to it's knees - drawing complaints from other customers of the hosting company. We were eventually thrown off the service (thanks Hostworks!) and had to quickly find another solution. We were lucky to find Webhost4life pretty quickly. Sure it was an unlikely sounding concept (pay once, website for life!), but it just worked, and SQL Server was included in the base plan for free! I quickly ported from Access to SQL Server (thanks to the fantastic Up-sizing Wizard) and things were back on track.

Given the unstable nature of the system I would sometimes have to write pleading emails to the support staff asking them to kill a database connection, restart IIS or even reboot the server. After doing this several times I had a brilliant idea - if I could get one of the support guys interested in playing the game, perhaps they would have more interest in keeping it running smoothly, and they might spot issues before I found out about them. The next time I had a problem (after the issue was resolved) I told the support guy (via email) about the concept and asked if he wanted to play - his response? "I'm a recovering alcoholic - I can't play".

6 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Was I the only one to laugh at his comment?

I can't wait until this game comes back :).

October 13, 2007 11:27 am

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Once cross your limite it will affect you very much do not cross the limit.
----------------
waugh
Alcohol abuse affects millions. This site has a lot of useful information.
http://www.alcoholabusecenter.com

June 09, 2008 12:56 am

 
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Ok i agree with all you say about the ASP but now they are more wonderfull programming languages. What kind of game are you talking about ?And i agree with what you said about unstable nature of the system.once you cross the limit it will be danger. so log on our web sites to know more about the alochol abuse
-------------------------
waugh
Alcohol abuse affects millions. This site has a lot of useful information.
Alcohol Abuse

June 09, 2008 1:16 am

 
Blogger lawyer said...

https://serenityoakswellnesscenter.yolasite.com/

June 06, 2019 2:53 am

 
Blogger lawyer said...

https://aboutserenityoakswellness.jimdofree.com/

June 06, 2019 7:36 am

 
Blogger ikeshiakaffenberger said...

What happened to Grilby's casino last week on Gambling Gurus
› s › australian 우리카지노 › s › australian Jul 4, 2021 — Jul 4, 2021 Grilby's casino has a long history of offering real money games and tournaments without them losing their 다크걸 players. In their recent

June 18, 2022 12:43 pm

 

Post a Comment

<< Home