September 18, 2006

Site Outage - Sponsored By Register.com

From approximately four p.m. this afternoon through near 7:30 this evening, all of louisgray.com was unable to be accessed from the outside world. While I noted the globe did not spin off of its axis, it was a minor issue for those on Athletics Nation who didn't understand why this week's ANtics was a 1x1 grayed-out pixel (that's not very funny...), and others looking to see my commentary on iTunes and Apple from external sites instead were confronted with time-outs.

In a situation like that, at the office, and unable to make calls to check in on it, I was sure it was my fault. Maybe the wrong credit card was the wrong one on the file... maybe some government agency didn't like my questioning of today's voting systems... or maybe somebody had hijacked the system?

Of course - it wasn't any of those things. In a chat with a support rep from Register.com, whose service powers the site, I was told, "We are running an emergency maintenance of our web hosting service," and that a "Lot of our web hosting customers are facing this problem." When asked how long it would be down, the first answer was "It will be done very soon," followed quickly by "We expect it to be done within a few hours."

Yeah... so "very soon" does not compute with "a few hours". And I haven't seen any notes of refunds or anything of that nature. Is 24/7 hosting too much to ask? Are hiccups to be excused? Good thing this site doesn't hold my main line of business or we'd be a little short of cash tonight!

Listening to ''Chasing Cars'', by Snow Patrol (Play Count: 3)