On january 22nd I woke up and went to check my blog, after the 3 post I had left the night before. It was gone. The web server was not responding. I assumed there could be some problem with the network connection, so I waited. By the evening, the server was still down. My service provider acknowledged that my service was running on a server that was “having a problem”, and I was not the only affected customer. The customer service representative apologized profusely, and offered me a case number. As I asked about an expected resolution time, she could only say “as soon as possible”. It was 12 hours after I had first noticed the issue, so I processed her “as soon as possible” as a “I’ve no idea” type of answer. How empowering, a case number that can’t be checked online, an obscure problem, and a service that took 36 hours to be restored.
I doubt I can expect a better service for the little money I pay, even though 36 hours of downtime still leave me rather shocked. Maybe it’s just professional deformation, the high avialability “5 nines” story everyone in the IT industry hears. As a consumer who doesn’t pour millions of dollars in IT expenditures every year, I should already know the 24×7 fairy tale is far from true. When I was living in China, Fidelity had a maintenance window for the 401k web page every time I was trying to access it, regularly leaving me without service. But 36 consecutive hours? I’m glad this blog doesn’t generate any revenue, except for the extra inner peace I gain when writing.
But hey, I’m back online! I’ve spent a few hours yesterday setting up and customizing the bookshelf sidebar, I hope you’ll like it, it’ll help ridicule myself as you realize how long a book stays in the “currently reading” state. I’m either a slow reader, or I’m just reading the wrong stuff.
A disclaimer, I haven’t set up an Amazon “associate-ID”, so I’m not advertising books for money. The plugin author of the Amazon Showcase WordPress Plugin used to get money on the users’ back, but I’ve noticed that the code that randomly sets his associate-ID is commented out now (even though the version number is still 1.3).