Almost three full days offline! That’s a new record for us. So you’re wondering what the hell happened. Seems the folks at our webhost were doing some load balancing and that meant moving a few sites around to different servers and we were one of the lucky ones that got moved. Which would’ve been fine and all except no one bothered to tell us and when they moved us they forgot to establish the link to our database from the new server. So the site was technically up and running and the database was technically intact and working, but they couldn’t talk to each other.

As to why it took nearly three days to fix I haven’t a clue, but I’ll go ahead and blame the Super Bowl for it. I’m not a sports fan and Super Bowl time is always very annoying especially when it’s being hosted locally and all the news shows seem to think it’s the only thing newsworthy to talk about. Look! There’s a bunch of celebrities in town for the Super Bowl! Let’s see what they think of Detroit! As if they would dare risk the bad PR of saying they think the town sucks.

The funny thing is, we almost missed the Super Bowl altogether as we started the day yesterday with a power outage. The second in as many weeks. This one lasted almost 13 hours so we spent most of yesterday trying to keep warm seeing as winter has finally decided to come back to Michigan. Alas, the power was back on in time for the game and for me to discover that my sites weren’t. Welcome to country living. We hardly ever had power outages in Canton and usually they were all of an hour on the rare occasions they did happen. The longest outage we had the entire time I lived there was that multi-state blackout a couple of summers back and even then we were down for a grand total of 18 hours or so. I was so spoiled.

So anyway, this whole downtime thing has convinced me that I really do need to buckle down and find a new webhost. If we’re using up that much resources that they have to keep shunting us around then we need a bigger home. I’m checking into VPS solutions and learning that, despite having run websites for more than a decade now, I don’t know jack shit about what I need in the way of RAM or what a good VPS solution would look like. So Elwed’s lending me a hand in that regard. As always, I’m open to suggestions.

Oh, and it’s good to be back.