When Hosting Goes Bad

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Web hosting is not a 100% thing. I tell people that while most reputable hosts legitimately claim 99% up time things do break. It doesn’t matter whether they are mechanical or electronic. Bad things happen from time to time.

That 99% figure is an average. What that means is that during any given month your web host’s server could be down for 7 hours or more and still qualify. Or, say they only had one outage during the whole year. That same 99% up time claim could be true if the server went down for 3 days straight.

Crazy. But true.

A Recent Case Study

Between Christmas and New Years I noticed a friend’s web site was down. Because April is a close friend of the Cree house I shot her an email, asked what’s up and if there was anything I could do to help.

April said she’d initially panicked when she saw the error message but had already contacted her web host and they were performing a server update. They assured her all would be back to normal shortly.

On April’s web site she’s got two different blogs, My Beautiful Chaos and Making Life Work for You. When the server update was done everything looked like it was OK with her second blog.

But there was some lingering Chaos on My Beautiful Chaos. Read more

Backing Up - It’s Not Just For Cars

As you’ve probably heard, my web host had a catastrophic failure on one of their servers yesterday. And yes, it happened to be the very server SuccessCREEations was on.

Then to compound the problem my host found that they had some bad CD-Rs in their backup storage so when they got things up and running they had to revert back to their last good backup which in my case was last Wednesday, a full five days back.

Ouch!

On my end, I normally do a manual backup on the weekends. Unfortunately this past weekend I worked what for me is about a normal month’s worth of overtime in 2-1/2 days. I snagged my sleep in 2 or 3 hour blocks when I could. I didn’t do my normal backup.

There are some lessons here. The first is Read more