MTTS’08 traffic and Quack Quack Jack

Posted on by Ian C.

Back from a day and two evenings in Boston for MTTS’08, with 350 pictures to sift through – I’ve decided to sort & post multiple times as I work through them … so although it’s Saturday night, this happened on Friday evening (hence the datestamp!)

I left work early, fearing traffic in Boston, and headed down towards F1 Boston, the Friday evening event headquarters … predictably I hit traffic as I reached Boston (taking 1-3/4 hrs to do 35 miles); traffic heading north was stopped too – and I spotted the MTTS “truck” for a moment:


When I arrived at F1 Boston, by pure chance I met Mark (SPDinNY) bringing Quack Quack Jack, so QQJ spent today at MTTS too – and met Jim McDowell (and his daughter), among others:


Also, see this post where QQJ meets Rauno!

Down time

Posted on by Ian C.

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 …