Let me take a moment to apologize for the 6+ hours of downtime my websites experienced today. When I woke up and switched on my computer at 8:00 am, it was already impossible to connect to any of my sites (of which I have a dozen, serving around 8,000 visitors on a typical Tuesday). The problem wasn’t resolved until mid-afternoon, and a few connection difficulties persist as I write this.
I have been promised a written apology and explanation, but all I have been told so far is that the server had “unscheduled maintenance”. I blame the lack of communication on what is obviously outsourced tech support. 🙄
Thank you to those of you who called or emailed to let me know the sites were down. I promise to buy you Mars bars and baked beans when I visit England this year.
If you like, you can find me on Twitter at @nick_ramsay. I'd love to hear from you!
STRESS!!!!!!!
It’s amazing how fast blood can boil when something like a server has gone down. It’s almost enough to make you want to run out and buy your own Xeon-based server and host it somewhere 😕
Well … it is for me, anyways.
Thanks for keeping us up to date on this, Nick. Hopefully everything is ironed out soon enough.
As an aside … you don’t happen to use MidPhase, do you? Their unscheduled maintenance plans darn near drove me back to alcohol a few months back ….
Nope, but after this experience, MidPhase sounds wonderful! 😉
You’re absolutely right, though. Six hours may not be that long, and if I’d woken up in the afternoon like I used to do, I might not have even noticed, but when you’re clicking the reload button for that length of time, you do start to crazy. I pay for an “Unlimited” plan, which must refer to the number of useless technicians have. 😛
Well hopefully that doesn’t happen again, but I guess this is what happens when you are in the business business! Oh nice widgets in your side bar! They class the place up!
That would have made me want to put a hit man on to them Nick. Trouble with that is that with over a billion of them living there, and at least half of them involved in IT out-sourcing, who does the hit man go after??????
For you not to go crazy over this is amzing and if it were me, I would have hired five hit men, an SAS squad and ten elephants to get it sorted!!
Cheers Keith
Wha? Nick’s server is hosted in India? I could have sworn it was hosted out of the US (Hopkinsville in Kentucky, no less).
Either way, I agree that a hitman should be hired to keep the tech crews in line. Not only is unannounced maintenance a nuisance, but it’s rarely even required unless the machine is dying or someone is messing something up.
As an aquaintance used to say: “Once the server’s running, shut the lights off and lock the doors. You don’t need to touch it again.”
That’s assuming it’s set up right in the first place, of course 😛
Ah … “obviously outsourced tech support” … my bad. I should really stop reading blogs and comments so early in the morning 😕
Hopkinsville! Do you hear that Keith? That’s where to send the elephants! 😛
Consider it done Nick!!
Nipponster was down that long one day but that was due to hackers (not fun!).
There is an interesting idea I just got off of a blog I follow called 45n5.com. It’s about a failover DNS.
http://www.45n5.com/permalink/the-web-hosting-tutorial-that-doesn-t-suck.html
That way even if the server is down your whole site is not.
And if you redirect the DNS to another server with another host you can still give your users some or all of the normal functionality of your site.