Ponder Place

Alright, so sometime early Wednesday morning (probably 4:00am is my unsubstantiated guess) the server hosting ponderplace.com went down. I didn’t find out about it until about 10:30am.

I tried the server and found it unresponsive. So I called my host and they confirmed it was down (thanks guys /sarcasm). They tried rebooting the server, which didn’t help, it was still dead. At this point they informed me they needed to escalated it to the advanced hosting support or something like that.

Meanwhile everything was dead.

A day passes and still nothing from my host, and suddenly I get the bright idea to redirect ponderplace.com to another hosting account I had available to me. Shame on me, because I actually should have thought of it the moment things went south. Anyway, after doing that visitors were greeted with the following message…

1/10/2008
Sorry! The server blew up (metaphorically speaking).

Unfortunately we will have to rebuild the server and website.
This may lead to our being unavailable through the weekend.

Thank you for your patience!

Meanwhile my host finally go back to me on Thursday (i think, details are fuzzy at this point). They informed me that it was back up, but that the server would need to be reprovisioned. Which in layman’s terms means that everything starts at 0 and I have to build ponderplace.com from my backups.

FYI, i’m forever greatful that I make faithful backups, I’m not sure you’d ever see ponderplace again if I didn’t.

This was a problem for me. The server I was on at this point is a real wench (to put it nicely) for an uneducated fellow such as myself to figure out. And in the last month I’d been contemplating moving to a Linux server.

I decided to skip building the windows server again, and bought the Linux hosting package. I’ll spare you the details, but basically i’ve been doing that all day today (Saturday). The actual Ponderplace.com part of it was surprisingly easy to restore, it took me about 30 minutes.

The irony of it all

The funny thing is that on Tuesday night (the night before the server killed over) at about 11:30pm I realized I’d not written anything for ponderplace.com. Over the holiday’s i’ve struggled with my desire to continue posting on ponderplace.com. I was tired, and it was difficult, but I decided to bite the bullet and write something.

I spent the next three hours (thats 2:30am) not only writing the Meanderment you see HERE; but I decided to add a new feature (and thus the reason it took 3 hours).

The ironic part is that at the end of the Meanderment I wrote the following…

We may never know (however if this site suddenly disappears and you see me walking along the road in tattered clothes and mumbling to myself (not to say homeless people mumble to themselves, but I’m pretty sure I would if I were homeless) than you can just assume that I’ve discovered their secret)

Nobody had a chance to read it, but the next morning I found the server dead.