Server Outage – Watkissonline.co.uk and First Aid Quiz

The websites www.watkissonline.co.uk – this website and www.firstaidquiz.com – The first aid quiz website, have both been unavailable for a day.

This is because NTL has changed the IP address that I am allocated on my cable connection. It doesn’t happen very often (a few times a year), but the process of getting my DNS entry updated means that the site can be down for a day or so.

Unfortunately the cost of using a proper hosted solution means that this is the best availability that I can have. I was hoping that the advertising would help towards the costs of a proper hosting solution, but so far I have not actually received any advertising revenue.

Until I do have sufficient funding to having a hosted solution I need to either continue with NTL Cable broadband, or switch my entire phone line and get ADSL with a fixed IP address, although neither of these will provide guarenteed availability.

Alternatively if anyone has links with a hosting provider that could provide me with a webserver in return for having a sponsorship logo on the firstaidquiz.com domain then I’d be interested to see what was available. I’m really looking for a dedicated server (due to the way that the quiz engine needs read and write access to certain files, and the ability to run a scheduled job).