Radiaton Network is gone?

Update: 6/9/11, 8:20 A.M. - RadiationNetwork.com down

Last evening, our web site RadiationNetwork.com went down. Since we use that site to upload the Radiation Maps for the benefit of the general public, there is a perception that the Radiation Network itself went down. But this is not so - the Monitoring Network continued uninterrupted during this period, and contributing members of that network were still sharing their radiation count data over the network, and monitoring activity using the Radiation Maps and Remote Graphs available within their copies of the underlying software which "run" the network. Here is the back story, though.

After the terrorist attack of 9/11, when Americans didn't know what might hit them next, we conceived of this idea of creating a citizen-based radiation monitoring network, and proceeded to develop software which linked together radiation detectors from across the country to create a sort of National Radiation Map. Initially, there was a lot of interest in the general idea, and we issued a number of licenses for Monitoring Stations. But with the passage of time, and the absence of any radioactive "event", interest waned, human nature being what it is, and our network reverted to a semi-dormant status for a number of years - until Fukushima. At that point, the die-hard Monitoring Stations that had loyally operated through the dry years were suddenly joined by dozens of new contributors, but more to the point, average citizens flocked by the thousands to RadiationNetwork.com in desperate search for any information they could get on potential radiation danger.

Well, that triggered a bandwith overage with our web host because we had reverted to a low cost hosting package to get us through the semi-dormant years. As soon as our web host notified us of the overage, however, we immediately upgraded our site to premium, unlimited bandwith status, which was supposed to fix the problem. But because the left hand of the web host (who shall go unnamed) was not talking to the right hand, our web sites were unexpectedly shut down. Early this morning, the sites were re-activated, and hopefully this outage will not recur. The good news is that since we administer the actual Radiation Monitoring Network through our own server, it continued to operate uninterrupted.

So, there was nothing sinister about the "shutdown", and our apologies for the outage. We know that many of you have come to depend on RadiationNetwork.com as one of many sources for information on radiation levels. This is probably a good opportunity for a reminder, though:

For those of you wanting more information and capabilities beyond that available to a passive viewer of our RadiationNetwork.com web site, you can purchase a copy of the real software, GeigerGraph for Networks, that makes all of this work. Installed on your local computer, you then have ability to zoom in on the Map to separate clustered stations (or use Picture in Picture), Spin the Globe over to Hawaii or Japan, Identify Monitoring Stations by Geiger Counter model, altitude, etc., look up Nuclear Sites, access Remote Graphs and Spreadsheets of radiation count data for every station to identify trends, engage in Chat with other Stations on the Network, and much more. Thanks.