I just had my first experience with the frustration of technical difficulties with my hosting provider. I’ve always either self hosted sites in the pats, or hosted them at a educational institution where I had direct access to the servers.. or else kept a blog at blogger.com, chich occassionally was down for a spell. But my hosting providers’ servers were down from at least Friday night to Saturday night. It was a shock when I wrote to support and received this reply:
Hello.
Sorry, there are issues with RAID on the server. The adaptec Raid-5 card is having problems rebuilding an array
after a single point of failure. We may have to restore from backups, which means more downtime.However, no data is lost yet. We may still have all your current files and may restore them. Either way, please be patient.
Please excuse us for the inconveniences.
I happen to actually know something about how RAID works (or is supposed to work), so this was more distressing than it was razzle-dazzle. When I sent another inquiry later Saturday, I received this:
Hello.
I am sorry, it’s going to take about 6-12 hours more to restore the server completely. Thank you for your patience.
Thankfully, everything seems to have been restored, complete with comment spam. (I deleted 50 or so that got through the filter.) Most importantly the site was back online in time for a comment from Wes Freyer. :)
If anyone missed Educational Technology and Life in the meantime, I hope you’ll understand and accept my apologies.
For me, it simply made it easier to focus on phd work during the time I had rather than having to decide whether or not to spend time blogging. (Right now I just finished getting a few articles into my outliner, and I’m tryign to get a few posts out the door while waiting for Eva to head for lunch.)