[Jazzbass]

OK, you may have noticed more service outages.

Monday night the server Dorki is hosted on crashed... again. This after it's last major crash 10 days ago. Again, I got no info right away. After a, well let's call it "unpleasant" email, I finally got a response. The server and hard drives crashed. Again. This is the second hardware failure in less than two weeks, and both failure resulted in hours if not days of down time. Also, there was some data loss this time. I'm not sure how much, but my guess is half a day's worth of posts are just gone.

The cherry on top of everything is that after the site is restored around 2am last night, I get an email from the host. It says that, basically, that because of all the problems they're going to up the price of hosting to cover more extensive backups and hardware support

That was that last straw. Poor communication, excuse after excuse and finally "so the price is now going up". So I switched hosting providers today. The new place is more expensive but is supposed to be faster, have great tech support, hourly backups and 99.9% uptime. We shall see, but so far, so good.

And yes, if you're wondering, this is a gigantic pain in the ass. Lots of database data and file upload data to move, server settings to updates, DNS entries, etc, etc. I don't say this to elicit "woe is me" type sympathy... I actually do this crap for a living, so bitching about it would a bit much. It's really not a big deal. No, my point is that there will probably be some issues. Everything seems OK now, but statistically speaking there has to be some problems. There are simply are way too many variables in a move like this for everything to have gone 100% correct. So, as always, watch out for weirdness and let me know.

Sorry for all the outage problems, and thanks for your patience.