You may have noticed that over the last couple of months our site has periodically been unavailable. You come here, and you get an error message of one kind or another. Usually the outages haven’t lasted long, maybe 10 or 20 seconds at a time — except for a 2-hour meltdown that happened last weekend. But in that case, our web host (BlueHost) went down across the board, crashing thousands of sites at the same time, allegedly due to some kind of “power surge” that knocked out our host’s servers in Utah.
Even though the downtimes on our site have usually been brief, it has still annoyed the shit out of me. Given the increasing unreliability of the service, I’ve also grown increasingly worried that something really fuckin’ bad will happen, like corruption or loss of data in our database, destroying years of priceless NCS work product. Late this week, I finally decided to bite the bullet and switch web hosts.
This is not a decision to be made lightly, because switching hosting services is a BIG fuckin’ hassle. But hey, guess what! I may not have to make the switcheroo after all! This morning I received this e-mail from BlueHost:
Please be advised, your hosting account is scheduled to undergo regular maintenance on Sunday February 10, 2013 at 12:01am EST.
No interruption of service is anticipated. We’ve scheduled this maintenance during non-peak hours as a precaution.
This maintenance is part of our ongoing commitment to provide you with the most dependable and advanced hosting infrastructure in the industry.
Our server administrators will be implementing measures designed to enhance the performance of your hosting server and reduce likelihood of downtime.Thank you for your patience and please let us know if you have any questions.
I find this encouraging, mainly because it gives me an excuse to delay putting in the hours necessary to switch web hosts. I sure hope this maintenance thing does the trick. Of course, I have no idea what “maintenance” means in this situation. Will they give the server an oil change? A lube job? A rim job? A wash and a wax? A bouquet of flowers and a kiss?
On Sunday February 10, 2013, at 12:01 am EST, please cross your fingers. And your toes.
2 Responses to “MAINTENANCE!!!”
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I’d say to remind Phro to cross his tentacles too, but it appears I’ve stumbled by after BlueHost did its mojo.
Yes, it appears we didn’t need the crossed tentacles because we’re still here. Now we’ll see if whatever they did actually works.