In case you’ve been wondering why the blogs have been appearing and disappearing quite erratically over the last few weeks, then I’d just like to point out that it is all the fault of my shoddy hosting provider.
The Paste website has been hosted through them F2S for years, and they always used to be extremely reliable, but since they were bought out by Pipex last year, things have rapidly gone down the pan. The most recent problems have been with their database server, which was down for a full 59 hours last weekend, and most recently for the whole of last night. If the database server goes down, then so do the blogs, so that’s why you might have seen this page looking a bit empty recently.
According to some disgruntled fellow customers on the user support forum, the problem can be resolved by typing one command on the server, but as there’s no one in the F2S office outside of normal working hours, if it happens during the weekend or overnight it won’t get fixed until shortly after 9AM on the next working day. Which is pretty poor.
I’d think about changing hosts, but I’m not sure if I can take the hassle. If this goes on for much longer I might have no choice, though. Grr.
Of course if you can read this, then everything is working fine. For now…
UPDATE Monday 9th October: Just for my own future reference, here is a list of some of the database outages so far:
– the evening of Tuesday September 26th, to the morning of Wednesday September 27th
– the evening of Friday September 29th, to the morning of Monday October 2nd (i.e. the entire weekend)
– the evening of Monday October 4th, to the morning of Tuesday October 5th
– the morning of Monday October 9th, until about lunchtime.
Hmm, now that’s some quality service there. If anyone can recommend a reliable alternative host, then I’ll be over there in a shot, but I’m worried that anything else I pick would be just as unreliable (and even if you can find a reliable host, then there’s nothing to stop Pipex popping up and screwing things up again…)