December 15, 2003

Dear visitor,

Due to the excessive load on the server I have been forced to remove the Create a Snowman pages. Yesterday, December 13, 2003 at around 6:00pm my hosting provider "flipped the switch" on this site and essentially turned it off. The traffic load was just too much to handle and it was about to "crash their servers." Since I was unable to get on the site to make updates, I was of course not able to tell anyone about what as going on or do anything about it.

Obviously, I am back up and running but I am without the snowman builder. I don't know when it will be back online. I have some people who may be interested in hosting it. When and if it does go live again, I will post a link right here to let you know.

I regret that this has happened. And again, I'm sorry to all of you who made snowmen and now can't see them or see any of the others.

At final count there were over 30,000 visitors to this site in less than four days (all but about 50 for the snowmen builder), 13,550 snowmen created and 1000+ undeliverable emails (thanks everyone who provided a phony email address when it said you didn't have to supply one). The average time spent on the site was just over 6.5 minutes.

Special thanks goes out to Miss Lis and smich who started my four day ulcer by posting a link on Metafilter.com. Thanks to genmay.com who started their own thread and all the other bloggers and sites that posted a link. Thanks to usedwigs.com for the Time Waster of the Week award. And finally, thanks to yahoo.com for making it a December 11, 2003 Pick of the Day and delivering an audience that was beyond imagination. I’m sorry that I am unable to live up to the honor.

Thanks also go out to everyone who created a snowman. Yes, even the dirty ones. Although somebody should have knocked each and every one of you in the head a couple times because there were children looking at this site and building snowmen. I know a few of you personally, so shame on you.

Thank you making snowmen and thanks for making the Create a Snowman pages an Internet one hit wonder.

Sincerely,

Chris Guy
naked-i.com