Down time

I guess nothing is perfect 😦

Last year I switched to Westhost to avoid the horrendous poor quality of Site5; I accepted paying much more per month to get quality – to quote from the website:
At WestHost we pride ourselves in maintaining not only a fast but RELIABLE connection
– Multiple redundant telecommunications paths and carriers
– Numerous secondary power solutions in case of emergencies
– RAID mirroring
– 24/7 monitoring, backups and security updates
24 hours a day, 7 days a week via toll free phone, instant live chat and rapid response e-mail

And typically they’ve been pretty good. They’re not particularly fast at serving WordPress pages – even though I have a VPS plan set up for re-sellers, and allocate the resources to only my few websites. But they do normally respond fast if there is an issue, and give me confidence.

Well last night, my websites went down. Visiting the support pages I found a message saying there had been a power outage and some sites might be affected. A power outage?! Isn’t that one of the things that any hosting company should be able to guard against?
After a while all my sites came back up, except GBMINI – I couldn’t access the management page either so I was stuck. I sent a support email, got a boiler plate response, but no more (generally within ten minutes any issue I email about is sorted).
A couple hours later GBMINI was still down; I tried online chat which gave a real person response, but they said “we’re busy, please wait” and seeing it was bed time, I didn’t.

Now of course, we’re up once more – although websitepulse says we were down more than six hours. I guess that’s not so bad if it doesn’t happen for another year …

UPDATE:
Turns out the Gallery v2 SQL database was trashed as well!
Thankfully I have backups, and had to re-post only one picture …

MINIs only ADSS 2008

Another year, and thanks to the White Mountain BMWCCA Chapter, MINI owners get another fine and fun day of burning rubber in a safe way! Thanks also to Concord Motorsport and MINI of Peabody for their support …

Sadly the event was under-attended – but with only 13 MINIs, we all got more hands-on time than normal 🙂
Since this was my 4th event (see 2004, 2005, and 2007), I did some time doing the braking and lane changing exercises, and some time photographing others – I also loaned out GPMINI to Jason and Brian, to get some great pictures of her going round the skid area (and in the afternoon I took her round, un-photographed!)

As always, this was a GREAT event and a must for anyone that wants to learn the behaviour of their MINI at the limits of braking and steering; it’s made even more fun with the many friends attending (Hi Jason, Brian, Sarah, Pete, David – and congrats on the new GP Peter!)

UPDATE:
Also see these “official” pictures of the White Mountain BMWCCA website