I had the server maintenance all worked out for very early this morning. Our data center staff was going to install a secondary hard drive in our server to give us more backup room. We are selling so many digital downloads that the hard drive space required for the site on the web server has grown exponentially. We now have over 10GB of files in Latter-dayvillage.com alone. All of the sites running on our server, e.g. our personal sites and some others we host, are backed up nightly to a separate location on the hard drive. From there, they are backed up to a secure disk storage array in the data center. But those 10GB of files are so much larger than we ever anticipated, that we decided to install a secondary hard drive just for backup.
After the data center staff installed the new hard drive, they started up the server again, around 3 am Mountain Time this morning, but did not check to see if the web services were running, only if the box could be pinged and accessed via secure shell. Later this afternoon, I pointed out to the tech I was chatting with that the box was a web server, how could they do maintenance and not ensure that it fulfilled its main purpose? I have not received an answer for that one yet. This is the first time our data center staff has really let us down; however, the problem would not have been as bad had I checked everything earlier.
Why didn’t I check the server earlier this morning? Well I had my own problems where at home. I live in lovely wind-swept
So I must admit I was not even thinking about the server. Finally someone sent me a text message asking if the site was down, when I discovered the problem.
I certainly apologize for any inconvenience the outage caused. It is not something we planned or could even imagine. Now where is the bottled water we stored…
