A Silicon Valley Writer

The ISP hosting my three websites and a dozen email accounts disappeared from the Internet for 36 hours last week, starting on Thursday morning at 10:00AM and ending Friday night at 9:30PM. If the outage had lasted less than 24 hours, I would’ve shrugged my shoulders and went on with life. Outages do happen from time to time. I started looking into alternative web hosting when 24 hours came and went, and discovered that my domain registrar, DirectNIC, could host my websites for half the monthly cost that I was paying. By the time the outage was over, I had already transferred my websites over. This was purely a business decision. When you’re a writer who submits short stories and receive payments via email, being off the Internet for an extended period of time is bad for business.

What happened? The dual data lines that the ISP had to the data center turned out not be as redundant as they should have be (i.e., both lines shouldn’t have gone down at the same time). The ISP owner was forced to make alternative arrangements that was both expensive and time consuming. I’m sorry that it was necessary to take my business elsewhere. I’ve been with this particular ISP for 15 years. I started off with a shell account to view web pages in Lynx, a text-based web browser, with a 14.4Kb modem back in 1995. All it took was an extended outage to remind me that this ISP was a successful one-man operation. That’s fine for hosting a personal website. But that’s not fine when you’re running a business with multiple websites and email accounts.

Fortunately, I had recent backups and was able to get the current data after the old ISP came back up. Since DirectNIC doesn’t offer a shell account for web hosting, I couldn’t upload and uncompress the backup file on the server. I had to upload all the files uncompressed, which took a long time with the DSL upload speed being slower than the download speed. Restoring the databases took a few minutes and chasing down various glitches took a few hours. Having been through a few of these backup transitions over the years, this was the smoothest to date.

As far as I can tell, I didn’t suffer too much from being off the Internet for 36 hours. My writing productivity was the biggest casualty: no blogging on any of the websites, no revisions on my first novel, and forget about writing short stories. All my time was focused on getting my websites moved over and working out the glitches. (If you do find any glitches, send me an email at webmaster at cdreimer.com.) Queued email found its way home and web traffic resumed to normal levels.

What’s new with the new web hosting? Not much. The biggest benefits are the reduced monthly cost, a finer control over the backend for each website, and a much more responsive support team. Otherwise, everything else remains the same. Next time that there’s an outage, I don’t think it’ll take 36 hours to fix.