All of us are at the mercy of forces beyond our control. Every now and then, one of those forces decides to bend us over and give us a good fist-fucking without so much as a reach-around.
Last night and early this morning our web site was down for something like 10 hours. Why? Because our web-hosting service, Bluehost, shut down all of the data servers at one of its two datacenters — the one in Provo, Utah. Of course, they gave no advance e-mail warning of this to any of their web-host customers, no info was available on Bluehost’s own web site, no human being was available at any form of tech support, no automated messages were set up to provide any info. Why? Because advance warning is inconsistent with a good fist-fucking.
Why did Bluehost take down all those data servers? They now say it was because a transformer near their facility exploded and the local electric utility required Bluehost to shut down all power so that the utility could repair the transformer. We’ve found no news reports about this, though we’ve looked. Who the fuck knows whether it’s true.
As of about an hour ago, Bluehost reported on its Twitter account that it had 97% of all the servers back up. Of course, our site was served by the 3% of the boxes that were still down. Why? Because the forces beyond our control were having too much fun fist-fucking us and didn’t feel like stopping.
As you can tell, the problem has been resolved. We’ll have a real post ready in the next hour or two. Inability to access the admin page where we create the shit on this site has slowed us down. Also, we’re too sore to sit down for very long at a time. Thank you for your patience.
11 Responses to “FIST-FUCKED”
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Downtime sucks, even more so when it’s sudden. But put it this way, you didn’t lose any content, right?
I was scared to death about that risk, particularly since it’s been about a month since I last backed up all the content (guess what I’m doing now) — but so far it doesn’t appear that we’ve lost any.
That’s good to hear. Data loss is some scary shit. I’m a graphic designer and I’ve had a whole hard drive shit the bed on me before…not fun.
It really scares the shit out of me, because this hasn’t happened before. It’s not like all the stuff we’ve created here would be a great loss to human culture if it all went up in smoke, but it’s ours and we’ve put a few hours into creating it. I don’t know how you survived your loss with your psyche intact. I don’t even know the steps necessary to re-create the site if it ever came to that, even if I had been more diligent about backing up the site data. My current mood? Feeling pathetically helpless.
I’ve gone through that too, and I’m in the middle of backing up my 3D content and applications to disk (and I always end up missing something somewhere). After that comes taking the older CD’s and DVD’s I have with stuff and copying their contents to my hard drive(s) to reburn to disc. I’ve had far too many discs fail to go through that hassle again. Plus, it’ll be handy to have everything in one place for when I do end up getting another desktop or laptop, though this computer won’t be retired at that point.
Well, now I’m really motivated to update my hard-drive back-ups too. I need to automate that process so it’s not dependent on my memory (the human one, that is).
I should look into automation myself, since I have a bad habit of going a long time between making backups, and I don’t obsess about getting everything saved. Sometimes you have to go through from the beginning no matter what. I suppose if I had an external hard drive (I have three internally) with a backup feature or a RAID setup, things might go a bit smother in that regard, but I make do with what I have.
“Every now and then, one of those forces decides to bend us over and give us a good fist-fucking without so much as a reach-around.”
“…advance warning is inconsistent with a good fist-fucking”
“Because the forces beyond our control were having too much fun fist-fucking us and didn’t feel like stopping.”
I almost spit my morning tea all over my monitor at work reading these three lines. Blue fucking star for you for succesfully working fisting into a metal blog. I feel bad for finding humor in your misfortune, but I needed that laugh this morning.
Good luck with the back up man. I know your pain. I have lost some important shit due to hard drive/computer failure. It fucking sucks.
Thank you! I guess there was a silver lining from that Bluehost debacle and the panic attack it induced in me. Otherwise, i doubt fist-fucking ever would have made it into these pages. 🙂
Queue up some 36 Crazyfists to get you in the mood. Not sure what the name is supposed to signify, but guess what a lot of people are likely to thing of, at least briefly.
Hell, they belong in the WTF? category in band names.
They do indeed. More evidence that most people in Alaska are nuts (even though these guys have since relocated to Portland). I read somewhere that their name comes from a Jackie Chan movie. Which just begs the question, I guess.