Hosting hiccups (SOTW December 27, 2019)

At the beginning of the month, the server that www.pre-pro.com sits on had the silicon equivalent of a brain-fart and scrambled its filing system which, in technical terms, is very, VERY bad. Since I had been lead to believe that the site was backed up automatically every week, I wasn’t too worried about the fact that it would be offline for a few hours while it was being moved to a new server (many thanks to Bruce Silva, Jack Sullivan, and several others who pinged me to give me a head’s up that the site was down).

When the site rose like a phoenix from the electronic embers, it appeared to be missing a few feathers and the timestamps all read 2014. A few frantic tech support calls later, it transpires that the site exceeds the auto-backup limit by several tens of gigabytes and had never been backed up, so it had been reset to the date when I first signed up with the hosting company. Urgh.

Long story short, it’s taken a while to get things up and running again; apologies to all for the inconvenience. I reloaded all prior “New and Shotworthy” posts today so they all have today’s date (I’ll try and fix that), but they are ordered by original posting date.

So. eBay.

In the past 28 days, at least 186 glasses listed, of which 108 went unsold. The average price of those that did sell was $43.94. The numbers are perhaps misleading in that they obscure the fact that good glasses are flying off the e-shelves as fast as they can be stocked, and I’m not sure that this is purely a Christmas-related blip in the data stream. Coming months will tell.

The more interesting offerings included a Hayner Harvest Home, which is the rarest and most valuable of the known etched Hayner variants. It has sold for up to $350 in recent years. diggerdaveb picked this one up in an auction lot from Glass Works Auctions; it sold in a buy-it-now for $195.00 after sitting for several months in his webstore; I’m surprised no-one picked it up earlier given that it is also a George Truog original design.

Los Angeles Brewing Company gave away a number of sampler glasses that are a little too big to be considered a shot and a little too small to be considered a beer, all of them featuring historically-significant California Jesuit missions. There were at least two series of mission glasses. The glass below is from one of the rarer series and fetched a respectable $224.50.

I’ll finish this update with two Jack Daniel glasses. JD has a world-wide following and I regularly get emails requesting glasses from the pre-Prohibition era. There are few to be had, however, and the price on any original JD glass is creeping forever upward. They sell for nose-bleed prices that casual pre-pro collectors might consider insane, but I honestly believe that the sky is the limit when it comes to valuations on anything JD.

The first is a plain-Jane, heavy, one-shot paneled glass from Hopkinsville, KY. It was listed with an opening bid of $500 by buzzardroost07 and sold a week later to 2***a without a contest.

The “Old Time” glass was listed by lakerdude33 as a $800 buy-it-now together with a beaded “Gunter’s Landing”. Not surprisingly, the bait was taken within a few days. Either make for a nice Christmas present for a Jack Daniel aficionado!