Website Outage

My website was down; here’s why.

History

For many years, I used to host my website from my house. It’s a very simple and cheap solution. Does your website go down when the power flickers? Sure. But that’s probably not such a big deal. Temporary outages should be expected on a decentralized platform like the Web. For me, the biggest hurdle to setting up a website in the first place was an irrational fear of publishing something “unprofessional”. I’ve since changed my perspective, and have come to relish the jank – it’s what proves my mettle as a fallible human being! Outages? Design flaws? Bring ’em on!

Moving to the cloud

A few years ago I moved my website onto the cloud. I was moving across the country, and wanted my website to be online while I set up a new house with an Internet provider, etc. Like the box that stays packed years after a move, I left my website on the cloud. I was planning on – eventually – redesigning it, adding a blog, and moving the server back into my house.

Impetus

The cloud provider I used was a very small, local provider. They seem to have recently gone out of business. As far as I can tell, they never warned me about this. My virtual machine and their website went down suddenly around two weeks ago. Hence, welcome to my new website!

Status

I’m slowly recovering things. Clearly my website is back online. My software releases are up as is the latest Preservation of Guix report. My Git repositories will be next. Fortunately, most everything on my website exists elsewhere, so I’ve been able to track things down. However, I did not have comprehensive backups, resulting in a few gaps. Notably, I don’t have the original signature for Disarchive 0.6.0, so I’ve created a new one.

Conclusions

What was that I said about human fallibility? Well, here we are! 😳 Allow me to conclude with the moral of almost every story involving computers: back your stuff up!