Borklog: One entry


22 December 2003

So some folks have been asking "what happened", especially since this is my second week-long outage in a calendar year. (as my friend Aaron told me, "You have the nuttiest hosting stories!"). So here's the deal as far I as I understand it. I host with a group called Acorn Hosting, a small shop based in Seattle that specializes in AOLServer and OpenACS, two webby technologies near and dear to my heart. Their rates are extremely reasonable, and service is outstanding. They lease machines from several dedicated service providers. It looks like one of them (the one which had my sites on it) decided to suddenly go out of business, unplug the machines, and vanish from the face of the earth, leaving the Cathy (who runs Acorn Hosting) in a real bind. A day or two after the Great Outage, she had me up and running on a new vserver on a new machine with a different service provider. That's how I was able to put my by "go away please" page. She managed to track down the original hosting guy and talk him into making the machine available to get most of the data off of. (given Acorn's policy of 'backups are your own responsibility', this is truly above-and-beyond the call of duty) I do have backups, they're just not organized well. Into this whole mix, I was wrapping up a 3-month long Borkware consulting gig, and couldn't spare the time to get the website contents restored. I wrapped things up on Friday, and spent the weekend getting databases restored and tweaking code to work with Postgresql 7.3 (some of the date/time syntax has changed) I still need to get my mailer working, and other assorted odds and ends, but things should be working now. If you find anything broken, please let me know. But in short, the Acorn Hosting folks were put in a very tough situation, and worked incredibly hard to resolve it. I'm sticking with them since they've treated me very, very well.
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