The official simonwoodside.com server, froodily hosted by Paul Schreiber went down at 2005/04/26 at 9:30 PM (Eastern) and came back up at 2005/04/28 at 12:40 PM, after which time the web server was still not responding for some hours. Paul is travelling and anyway he lives in California while the server is in Toronto, so there’s always a bit of lag time when it needs to be physically rebooted.

On the 27th I started to change over semacode.org to be hosted by a commercial hosting company. I chose Net Direct which is more of a linux consulting shop but I met their CTO, John van Ostrand, at a Communitech event and was impressed by his knowledge of Linux and languages. I’m not keen to be my own sysadmin or manage my own hardware, but I run a bit of an unusual web server because of AxKit. So having a technically profient organization that’s prepared to handle some rather unusual configuration requirements is I think a big advantage.

So, at the moment semacode.org is running temporarily on netdirect’s regular server space. It’s just a static mirror of the site that I generated from my powerbook. Because of that there’s a few issues and I can’t update the weblog (for example) as easily as normal. Hopefully over the next week we’ll get a new dedicated server up and running and everything will be back to normal but much more reliable!

(Based on the last few years, Paul’s server gives about 98-99% availability which means, practically speaking, 3-6 days of downtime a year. It’s OK for my personal site but not really good enough for a commercial server.)