Friday, April 1, 2011

Temporary downtime for jsunpack website

The website for this project jsunpack.jeek.org has been down for the past 2 days because I was moving it to new hardware. The old hardware was running ESXi and caused all virtual machines to lock up repeatedly. While I was moving it the site was completely offline but I'm happy to say its back now!

Keep in mind, if you had been running jsunpack-n locally then you wouldn't have experienced any problems (thats software is freely available and that is what the server is running).

[off topic] I've seen a few people do a great job in downtime situations, none of which I did because this whole project is running from a single virtual machine with limited resources. For instance, when Netflix was recently down they acknowledged the problem and credited subscriber's accounts. When another site was down, they played a funny "Doh!" error message video from the Simpsons. In yet another case, DreamHost apologized and wrote a funny blog about it (note: I do not use or endorse DreamHost but I do read their blog). Some quotes from that post:

"I’d like compensation. You’ve earned it! You pay for 365 days of service – not 364.375"

"Why didn’t you call me? We would have loved to reach out to every customer individually, but with over one million domains hosted, that could – quite literally – have taken all year. We’d have loved to email you too, but well, we had this little network problem blocking emails."