I am sure you may have noticed by now, how over the last 47 hours this blog has been unreachable, returning a nasty error indicating it’s been down throughout all of that time. There have been numerous folks out there, who have been wonderful and kind enough to ask around, through other means, what was happening with the blog itself and the reason why it’s been down for so long, and the short answer is that my hosting provider decided to go through a major hardware upgrade over the weekend that just completed earlier on this morning, after those 47 hours I mentioned above. The good news is that https://elsua.net is now back up and running, faster than ever! The bad news is that I am not sure whether I would be recovering from this one outage in a long while!
I have got plenty of mixed feelings at the moment, to be honest. I have been with HostPC Internet Services for over three years now and all along the customer support and the Internet services provided have been outstanding. Till the last couple of days, where they mentioned in the Support Forums, that they would be going through this hardware upgrade over the weekend to make things go even faster. And somehow it’s taken a whole lot more than what I think would be considered a necessary downtime.
The end result is that yes!, things are snappier than ever, with some amazing response times. But at the same time the traffic coming into the blog has almost disappeared! Gone! Vanished! Zipped! Nada! Nothing! Into thin air and probably won’t be returning back any time soon! Guess this is just what happens when your blog goes down for more than two days without any prior warning and, in this case, it is just really bad timing after the recent massive increase of blog traffic thanks to the Mashable & TWiT net@night effects.
All of that effort, all of that traffic, is now gone after my hosting provider decided to go through a hardware upgrade without telling its users it was going to happen; no notifications being sent out to prepare our audiences for the downtime; no notifications alerting us when the system would be back up to keep us all informed; no notifications shared across as to what would be the potential repercussions of such upgrade. Instead, we get to suffer from them right away! And hope for the best! Ouch!!
And that’s where the mixed feelings start kicking in once again. Right now, after that customer experience, and facing that huge sudden drop in blog traffic (From the several hundreds of visits to just a few dozen at the moment!), due to the site being unreachable, I feel like I need to find another hosting provider, more than anything else to show them how you need to treat your customers with a little bit more of respect, at least, how you need to prepare better for such downtimes, so that those very same customers can help their own “customers” prepare for that unavailability of their Web sites. But then again I don’t want to throw away overboard the wonderful support and customer service I have been having over the last three years till this past weekend. What to do? What to do?
A good friend of mine told me once, a few years back, when I was first starting to blog, both internally and externally, to actually avoid blogging whenever you would be upset or angry about something, because in most cases you very rarely know what is going to come along after that. The backlash. He also told me how it’s a good thing not to take any harsh decisions when you are upset, because you have a tendency to lose your focus, specially, when those decisions may have, or involve, a long term impact. So I think I’m going to cut them some slack for now and stick around with HostPC Internet Services for a little bit longer…
For how long, you may be wondering, right? Well, that pretty much depends on you, my dear readers of this blog. I am going to let it rest for a couple of days and see if blog traffic resumes to the healthy level it once was (A couple of days back!); that way it would give me a chance to chill out, cool things off a bit, think about it carefully and if within two or three days things haven’t picked up again, then I think it would be a good time for me to start looking for another hosting provider. Something like a new, fresh start, except that, this time around, somehow, it would feel that I have left behind a huge part of me: you, my faithful readers, who have kept coming back for more over the years.
Somehow, I strongly feel that things will never be the same anymore, after having experienced this 47 hour long outage. But we will have to wait and see whether you folks will be coming back and stick around or whether you may have moved elsewhere. You know, the Internet, sometimes, does these things to you. Fingers crossed things will go back to normal and to what they used to be before. For now regular blogging at https://elsua.net will resume from here onwards…
My sincere apologies to all of you folks out there, who may be reading this blog entry, for this unexpected and unprecedented downtime. Hope you will be forgiving the sudden and abrupt interruption of service and please do come back soon! We miss you…
Technorati Tags: Blogging, Communication, Enterprise 2.0, Metablogging, Perceived Risks, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Networks, Social Software, Web 2.0, Weblogging, elsua, HostPC Internet Services, Hosting Providers, Downtime, Customer Service, Customer Support, Outages, Recovery
I’m amazed that a 47 hour outage would have that outcome on your blog. Frankly, you’re a fixture. Certainly wretched that it hit after such a great number of exposures, but I wonder if the counters just haven’t caught up yet?
Luis,
The post you linked to in the support forum says that they customers will “be notified in the coming days via the email address in your Directadmin control panel. (Be sure that’s updated and current).” I assume you didn’t see the notice about your site because either a) they didn’t actually send you an e-mail or b) they sent it but you didn’t receive/read it.
If the latter, it seems that this may be an example of the real, though unfortunate, consequences of living a life without e-mail?
My way of saying, I guess, give them another chance. And maybe let them know that they need to add a bit of social media to their notification process.
Amigo, I’m glad elsua.net is back. Makes you wonder what kind of disaster recover one ought to consider. I suppose with the search engines there’s a cache out there somewhere, but who could find it?
I strongly believe your traffic will come back, don’t worry. It just will take a little time for people to rediscover, but they will as I think the vast majority see the ticklers for this from other venues or their RSS will kick back in now that it’s up, etc.. Take heart! Sorry to hear about the misfortune.