The paper’s Web site — www.northcoastjournal.com — has been down almost all day, and now it looks like it’s gonna roll right on into tomorrow.
The people at Morse Media say that this is due to problems at the datacenter facility from which Morse rents space. That’s Silicon Valley Web Hosting — see their ultrahelpful Web site here, and remember the generic faces in that stock photography if you’re ever in the market for rackspace. A Twitter search reveals that SVWH’s other two customers have also been locked out. Jakio’s hurrah came during a brief moment of sunshine around 5 p.m.
I’m guessing that the crack crew down at SVWH has called it a night, and they’ll come back in the morning to stand around the machines and scratch themselves. In the meantime, the North Coast Journal is effectively out of business, Internet-wise. No Web site, no e-mail.
Thank you, SVWH, may I have another?
UPDATE: And even as I type, we’re back up. Let’s see how long that duct tape holds.
UPDATE 2: Bob Morse says:
Site is back up. Massive power outage at the data center. This caused ripple effects in the various network connections, blah, blah.
This article appears in Falling Trees Ahead.
I wrestled with Google for 20 minutes trying to call up the NCJ dot com before seeing this post.
It appears to be working now.
Jinx!
Frickin’ frackin’ mumble mumble mumble …
ahh, well, at least the Blogthing is operational.
The servers in that space were back online shortly after 11 PM. What was most galling was the lack of communication from svwh.
A little downtime is good for the soul.
A real problem is when your website goes walkabout, and you realize your hosting company’s weekly back-ups occur every six months and their ancient backup is corrupted and you get strung along with a whole month’s worth of excuses and then you’re explaining to your distant relatives that your baby blog containing hundreds of photos of Little Precious is gone, gone, gone. Well, then, Houston has a problem.
Nah, for regular downtime, don’t sweat it unless it’s so frequent that you begin using an “uptime checker” service to e-mail you outage reports.
Well, I had a look at their website, and they seem both very informative, and very substantial.
I would say that these things happen. They actually offer 100% uptime guarantees, which is a measure of their confidence how few times such things will happen.
Maybe you can collect?
Perfection – we’ll do better with what’s generative…!
R.
AJ: After this and another close call last week — the latter one my fault — I’ve instituted a truly mind-boggling backup regime. The Journal rsyncs and svn ups itself all over half the goddamn Internet every single night. A work of art.
Roald: Informative and substantial? If you say so. I remind you that that’s stock photography. Check out Bob’s take.
Have a look a this page, which shows pictures of their very substantial power infrastructure. Diesel generators, batteries, high power utility line feeds – each redundant.
I would say something very substantial happened to them, to get past this safety net. When it did, possibly the high-power nature of it all meant it took a little time to physically change out the necessary parts.
Of course the ‘operator standing by’ and ‘salesperson – executive’ images are stock photography. Everyone does this.
Regards,
Roald
Whoops – the page is here:
http://www.svwh.net/network_data.php
Meant to say also that their peering arrangements and proximity to the main US feeds sound very good. At the bottom of the page.
I have finally gotten some information from svwh. It appears the communication issue was due in part to my gmail account where their responses were being sent to Spam. This had never happened before. Until I logged in to the web interface I was not aware of it. I’m still not clear about why I couldn’t get through on the phone. The owner says they were answering all day.
Some other info which I will place on my own blog:
“As you are aware there was a major power outage yesterday at the data center we are located in. Even though our data center has a back-up battery system and back-up generators, there was apparently a failed capacitor bank that prevented either the batteries or the generators from helping. We will be learning more about what happened tomorrow when the data center owners provide us with an RFO or Reason For Outage
document.”
This is a substantial company that manages hundreds of servers (whereas the data center houses thousands of servers). They’re service has, in general been quite good.
Bob, glad to hear what you’ve learned. It will be interesting to hear what the RFO says.
The Gmail-spam thing — it does happen once in a while. Gmail spam traps are very good, letting very little get through. On the other hand, every once in a while something about a message from a source that has been trusted causes a trapping. I just check the Spam on the online Gmail every few days (or more often if something important is awaited). Well worth it for the excellent service, secure access, and excellent spam removal, at least here.
Anyway, while not from the area any more (since 60’s), I keep track and may even someday return. So it’s very nice to find yours and your wife’s business there, in looking up your weblog.
Regards,
Roald