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website outages and associated comments

Jeff Jilg

Jeff Jilg

Joined
Apr 9, 2004
Messages
1,287
Likes
5
Location
Austin, TX
Website
www.woodturner.org
From time to time our website will be offline. Today it was offline (unavailable) for 20-40 minutes. Our website is hosted by a company in North Carolina and in general they provide very good service.

They have an automatic alerting service which notifies live human beings whenever there are problems with our webserver (hardware or software). Each time I have called them over the past 2 years, they were already aware of the situation and in the process of resolving it. And that includes Saturdays and Sundays. So lately if the website is down I just wait 1/2 hour before I call in the problem. And fortunately it is pretty rare.

But unfortunately when the website is down, you will not be able to look up my email. If the site is down for a protracted period you can send me email and I'll look into it. Note that I am not asking for emails here....just telling you that I will be responsive as needed. I currently am back working full time in a computer company (sigh), so I will monitor the site from time to time, and I will also monitor emails.

If we have frequent problems with the webserver or the support from the host company becomes a problem then I assure you that I will actively look for another vendor. Frankly, the 2 support guys at our webhost have been very pleasant to work with. They spent a bunch of time helping configure the background software for both the POP software project and this forum. And they have provided some debugging help too. So their help has benefitted this website in general. :cool2:
 
Portions of the AAW website were down for over 2 hours last night. I will continue to monitor the service we receive from the current company. They actually monitor the website every 5 minutes with alerting software. As soon as the problem occurred last night they started working on it. Unfortunately it took 2 hours to resolve it last night.

Our homepage has static and dynamic content. The static content is stuff like text or a picture of the AW Journal cover which I manually program into the homepage every week or so. The only dynamic content on the homepage is the "picture of the day".

Typically the server software in N.C. which drives our static content is fine. The server in N.C. has more frequent problems with the software which drives the dynamic content. Currently, if either static or dynamic server problems occur, then the homepage does not respond. When the homepage does not respond, you will see an error message instead of the homepage. (The error message is a ColdFusion error message).

I'm going to see if there is a way to handle errors on the server from the dynamic portion of the software in N.C.. That way people would be able to see the homepage if there are problems with the dynamic server software.

The AAW forums are dynamic and are based off of 2 technologies - PHP and database. Unfortunately these 2 technologies are often the actual outage. So I won't be able to write error correction workarounds for these. If either PHP or the database services are offline then the forums won't work.
 
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