Note: a brief break from Korea updates, but they will be back soon.
Earlier today I was surprised to find that I was unable to access my website, goestotwelve.com, which is more than just a vehicle for me to publish this blog; it’s also my personal file dumping ground, a way to transfer large amounts of data when email attachments won’t get the job done. I’ve experienced outages with various web sites that I work on before, but it just so happened that I needed it to get something done this time.
I was back online after a few minutes, but I received an interesting email from my hosting provider later in the day explaining what happened:
Dear Customers,
At 7:40am this morning, one of our air conditioning units failed in the cage at the One Wilshire building, the building’s maintenance department dispatched an engineer to attend to their unit, which is now fully operational. Unfortunately as a result of this, some of our servers in the One Wilshire building were in danger of overheating and were shut down as a precautionary measure. All servers are either up or in the process of being up at this moment.
We greatly apologize for the inconvenience caused to any of our customers who have accounts on the Los Angeles datacenter servers, one of 4 datacenters we use for hosting.
Let this serve as a reminder and warning, all ye who depend on technology. Consider this a PSA from me to you:
- There is no such thing as 100% up time
- Sometimes it’s not enough if your computer and connection are 100%; these days, complex tech equipment depends on a bazillion other things that you wouldn’t immediately think of as crucial to technology: air conditioning
- Have a redundant backup for as many critical tech pieces that you can realistically have. My website and FTP storage space is probably not the best example, but consider these: If GMail goes down, do you have your email saved locally in Outlook/Apple Mail, or is it all held hostage by Google’s servers out in the cloud? If somehow you allow your hosting account to expire, will all of your web content disappear when your account is taken offline, or do you have it backed up somewhere? If your only copy of your final paper is saved on Google Docs, what do you do when Google Docs is offline at 3 AM the day it’s due?
