Update. The site was down all day, from 7:30 am to about 7:00 pm EST. Any comments you made were lost. Please, please post them again. With hope, the site will stay up from now.
Apologies to everybody. The site was down for over three hours last night because of the host, which is Yahoo. It was down from about 1:30 am to about 5 am EST.
I have emailed them asking for an explanation, but I can’t really expect one. Last time I emailed about this problem, they said, “The site looks like it works to us.” Never mind that I was talking about an outage that occurred earlier.
They do not hire the best people to answer support questions.
I asked for a refund for the down time. I have as much chance of that as Nancy Pelosi finding a sense of humor.
I’m not sure, but any emails sent to me during this period might also have been lost.
Don’t feel lonely Matt, quite a few of my favourite American sites were down at the same time.
I never lose comments when my site goes down.
Your agreement probably permits the host some downtime. It’s too bad they couldn’t explain it though. My host can usually tell me what went wrong. (My blog was down briefly when the switched servers last week.)
I HATE it when that happens!!!!!!!!!!
My site and email has gone down 3 times in the last 3 months for 4, 8, and 23 hours. All email boxes down too.
Generally email sending programs keep trying, so the email get through eventually, but the would-be site visits are lost.
Trouble is, most web-hosting companies don’t provide enough server redundancy, something that they claim to provide but don’t. They spout about cloud computing, instant switching, etc. but it’s all a marketing ruse, as far as I can tell.
My techie pal says to try a company called 1and1. Says they’re the best. I don’t know about that, but you might want to google them and check them out.
Actually, just for your info I noticed it shortly after midnight PST last night so it was acting up even before 7:30 AM EST. Didn’t stick around and put off emailing you ’cause I knew you’d notice it in the morning.
Yahoo!, huh? Maybe they misplaced their exclamation mark and simply became lower-cased uncultivated brutish thugs who couldn’t figure out how to reboot their server, let alone answer their phones.
Glad you’re back up, now.
All,
Comments were lost because the site was throwing 502 errors most of the day There was no site to put comments into.
And when it did come up from time to time, it was put into read only mode.
Yahoo did “routine maintenance” the day before and obviously screwed something up. The tech support guy I talked to, nice as he was, did not sound like he understood what was happening anyway.
For my troubles, I am going to receive a 10% discount on next month’s bill.
Mike,
Tired 1and1.com before. Have a horror story for it. In this case, their automated system would ignore my credit card, Paypal, or any other way I tried to pay. Emails and emails to see how I could pay my bill. Finally, a letter from a collection agency. I finally got a tech support guy on phone and he said, re: the credit card trouble, “There can’t be a trouble because nobody has reported one before.” But I am reporting one now. “But nobody else did.”
Went that way for a few rounds. I canceled immediately after.
If it helps I was getting an error to the effect “Couldn’t write to censored” – might not be the right document number but it was the most recent.
Hacking the URL to censored showed a directory listing and all the html files in it were accessible; still is now. Ideally, browsers don’t get to see directory listings.
So the site as a server was still functioning but something in the software was screwed.
If you ever get to talk to real tech support this may help.
Best,
Editor’s note. I deleted the name of the directory until I get the problem fixed. I don’t want to encourage any naughtiness. Thanks, Rich!