Just a heads up to Canadian Atheist readers, there will be a brief period of downtime in the coming weeks.
Upcoming downtime
What’s happening is that the Canadian Atheist server is being moved to newer hardware. This is not something I’m doing myself; our hosting provider is upgrading their infrastructure.
The transition should be problem-free. Should. But there will be a brief period while the server is down. It shouldn’t be more than a couple of hours.
I have the option of telling the hosting provider exactly when to do the transition, but I think I’ll leave it up to them. We’re not exactly a turnkey operation, after all… we’ll be already if the site is down for a couple hours, even during our peak times. And by giving more flexibility to the hosting provider, hopefully that will make it easier on them, which will hopefully translate into less problems.
Yeah, I know, a lot of “hopefully”s in there, but that’s how these things go. It’s not like we have a bunch of backup servers like the big sites, so we can’t exactly make the transition transparent.
Currently, it looks like the transition will happen sometime on . I can’t give you a more precise time than that. Presumably they’ll be moving a lot of servers at the same time. And CA is actually pretty big.
They’ll send me an alert when they’re about to start moving us. I’ll tweet when that happens, if you want to keep an eye on @IndiInTheWired (I mean, assuming it’s not at some asinine time when I’m asleep or away from the computer).
What about the downtime a couple weeks ago?
Ah, yes, about that. 😬
So, Canadian Atheist was down for a couple days—roughly to . The downtime was extra long because, well, it was the holidays, and I didn’t notice right away. But also because it took some time to fix.
The cause was partly my fault… but also partly our hosting provider’s. What happened was… I was two days late with an annual payment. Yeah, yeah, I know, but it was a crazy time, leading up to the holidays, I had family up from the islands staying with us… just lots of shit going on. And, honestly, I wasn’t too concerned, because I know that there is a 30-day grace period. So, yeah, I was two late, but I was also like, meh, still had 28 days before it would have been a problem.
Little did I know.
This is where the hosting provider’s portion of the fuck-up happened. They accepted my payment… but one department forgot to notify another department. So the grace period ended… and Canadian Atheist was still on the “had not paid” list. And thus, was duly shut down.
As I mentioned, it took me a day or so to notice… at which point I contacted the hosting provider. They were baffled at how this had happened, so it took them the better part of a day to figure out what the hell was going on. When the finally realized they’d fucked up, they immediately fixed it. But unfortunately, with DNS, changes don’t immediately. It can take up to 48 hours for DNS changes to propagate through the internet… in theory; in practice, it’s usually only a couple hours, if that.
So, it’s all fixed now.