For those that didn’t notice–nevermind. For those that did, let me tell you a story. It involves the Psi website as well as my own, as well as 20 others that myself and my partner hosted on our leased server.

When you a lease a server, you have two points of failure for which you have to trust your ISP. One: the hardware itself. Obviously if a server is far away and you don’t even own it, there’s nothing you can do if a server goes down but complain. Two: the network infrastructure. Your uptime is only as good as your network, and you speed is only as fast as the network.

With these two important pieces there is nothing you can do but trust that your provider will keep things running. If you don’t trust them, I hope you aren’t paying more than $10 a month.

Well, I paid a bit more than $10 a month.

A couple of Saturdays ago, my server went down hard. No ping, no nothing. A couple of days research found that the company, Managed.com, got bought out by another company by the name of Webhostplus.com. Never do business with either, warning you in advance here.

In the infinite wisdom of WHP, all of the servers were shutdown, and the hard drives shipped to a new datacenter. No notice was given of any kind. I’m sure they had thousands of customers affected. A few days later, my server popped into existence. I checked the box, it was a different one. Faster too, but not much of a consonlation. By this time, my partner had driven to a local datacenter and dropped off a new server he and I had built.

So now, all my sites, including psi-im.org, halr9000.com, eastcobbcoc.org, brindysgiftables.com, jabbermap.com, and more, are in a datacenter that is very well connected. And I’ve removed the trust issue because I own the server.

Lesson learned.

(The silly thing is that I do this for a living and should know better. )