I’ve totally backdated this entry to yesterday, when I meant to post it, except my not-so-hot hosting company took the entire server offline to backup a failing drive. I definitely expended more energy fretting about my lack of blogging ability than it takes to write an entry anyway, so I don’t think I should be disqualified!
When I emailed the hosting company to let them know I was pretty pissed that there would be an hours long outage to backup a drive, their response was “Unfortunately hardware failures are a fact of life. They’re inevitable. We don’t plan for them, but they do happen.”
Um… if your only business is maintaining hardware to hold onto people’s data, and hardware failures are inevitable and a fact of life, WHY ON GOD’S GREEN EARTH IS THERE NO PLAN?
Eighteen hours later, my site is up and running. Hoo-frickin-ray.
Anyone know of a good host that has some concept of service-appropriate backups? Because I’m definitely looking.
In the meantime, here’s a pretty picture:
If I had to take down my work server to backup a failed drive, I would be looking for work. Can you say “RAID 5 array” and “Hot Swap Drives” boys and girls?
In the end, you get what you pay for. Cheap (ie, under $10/m shared hosting, which it appears that yours is) doesn’t have that sort of infrastructure in place. If you want more reliability, be prepared to pay for it.
That said, my experience with Site5 (both when I was shopping around and when working with other peoples sites) hasn’t been the most positive in general.
Hah, SGC beat me to the obligatory “ever heard of RAID?” comment.
Check out neverhost.net, sounds like it might be just what you need (of course I’m biased seeing as it’s my boyfriend’s company, but still! Good stuff!). He’s really good with making sure there isn’t any downtime and his plans are quite reasonable.
Very pretty pic, indeed! 🙂
Happy Holidays!
~Crissy
http://www.paraviondesign.com