As many of you noticed, the site was down with a rather rude message for most of this afternoon and evening. The message gave the impression that the "owner" of the site (me) had done something wrong, or had not payed the bill. By "owner", I mean the person who's name is on the account with the ISP that hosts this place - we all know this site is "owned" by the community here. Mike and I are just caretakers, but I digress...
For those of you who missed it, here's a link to the page that was displayed.
Here's what happened.
Around 4:30PM PST, the message at the above link started appearing. I immediately contacted the ISP that hosts this site, and opened a support ticket. The ISP responded fairly promptly, telling me that we had exceeded our disk space quota. I was fairly sure they were mistaken; the photo albums take up a lot of space and grow rapidly, so I pay very close attention to how much space we're using. I had just checked it last night, and space was fine.
Anyway, their response was to "delete some files", and the suspended account situation would resolve itself once our disk usage dropped below our quota. Trouble is, when they locked up web access to the account, they also locked me out of all the administrative tools I have to manage the site - tools necessary to "delete the files".
When I pointed this out to the support technician around 5:00PM PST, all response from him ceased. I attempted numerous times to follow up with him - I was ignored. As of about 11:00PM PST, another tech support person picked up the ticket. Once he did so, the problem was fixed in minutes.
There was no problem on our end - we were well below the disk quota, and the site has been pre-payed through October of 2004. This was 100% a screw-up on the ISP's end.
As you can all probably guess, I'm none too happy with the way this turned out. I can handle an outage from time to time; that's to be expected. But to have rude notices displayed, indicating the site owner is a deadbeat, I find completely unacceptable.
The good news is, as I touted back when we left MSN - we are in control here. I backup the site nightly to my local equipment, and if the need arises, I can have this place moved with virtually no interruption in a couple days to another ISP. Such a move would be completely transparent to everyone accessing the site. I'm investigating the possibility of doing just that, but a final decision has yet to be made.
Until then, please accept my apologies for the outage this evening. I'll do what I can to make sure it's not repeated.
In closing, I feel compelled to state the following, due to email responses I received while the site was down. This site will NEVER suffer the fate that hit another popular C-Dory site when it was suddenly, and unexpectedly deleted. The caretakers of this site care deeply about it, and would never intentionally take the site down. If you ever see strange messages or weird site behavior while visiting, rest assured we're on it, and will be working to get things back to normal as fast as possible. Great care has been taken to ensure nothing intentional or accidental can ruin our community. There's so much more to this place than a bunch of text on a screen; this place is alive with great people sharing wonderful experiences. Please don't ever think those of us managing the nuts and bolts under the covers don't realize this every day.
Ah crap...it's getting late, I'm tired, and I'm getting all mushy. I hate it when that happens... :love :love :love
For those of you who missed it, here's a link to the page that was displayed.
Here's what happened.
Around 4:30PM PST, the message at the above link started appearing. I immediately contacted the ISP that hosts this site, and opened a support ticket. The ISP responded fairly promptly, telling me that we had exceeded our disk space quota. I was fairly sure they were mistaken; the photo albums take up a lot of space and grow rapidly, so I pay very close attention to how much space we're using. I had just checked it last night, and space was fine.
Anyway, their response was to "delete some files", and the suspended account situation would resolve itself once our disk usage dropped below our quota. Trouble is, when they locked up web access to the account, they also locked me out of all the administrative tools I have to manage the site - tools necessary to "delete the files".
When I pointed this out to the support technician around 5:00PM PST, all response from him ceased. I attempted numerous times to follow up with him - I was ignored. As of about 11:00PM PST, another tech support person picked up the ticket. Once he did so, the problem was fixed in minutes.
There was no problem on our end - we were well below the disk quota, and the site has been pre-payed through October of 2004. This was 100% a screw-up on the ISP's end.
As you can all probably guess, I'm none too happy with the way this turned out. I can handle an outage from time to time; that's to be expected. But to have rude notices displayed, indicating the site owner is a deadbeat, I find completely unacceptable.
The good news is, as I touted back when we left MSN - we are in control here. I backup the site nightly to my local equipment, and if the need arises, I can have this place moved with virtually no interruption in a couple days to another ISP. Such a move would be completely transparent to everyone accessing the site. I'm investigating the possibility of doing just that, but a final decision has yet to be made.
Until then, please accept my apologies for the outage this evening. I'll do what I can to make sure it's not repeated.
In closing, I feel compelled to state the following, due to email responses I received while the site was down. This site will NEVER suffer the fate that hit another popular C-Dory site when it was suddenly, and unexpectedly deleted. The caretakers of this site care deeply about it, and would never intentionally take the site down. If you ever see strange messages or weird site behavior while visiting, rest assured we're on it, and will be working to get things back to normal as fast as possible. Great care has been taken to ensure nothing intentional or accidental can ruin our community. There's so much more to this place than a bunch of text on a screen; this place is alive with great people sharing wonderful experiences. Please don't ever think those of us managing the nuts and bolts under the covers don't realize this every day.
Ah crap...it's getting late, I'm tired, and I'm getting all mushy. I hate it when that happens... :love :love :love
Diane
Just kidding Bill :thup 