I woke up this morning hoping to get an article out before my day gets busy, since I had the time and nothing else planned. I figured I would get something simple up to fill the gaps between those multi-article days.
I loaded up the website only to discover nothing. Well, nothing but a 500 error, which is a generic server error.
Wonderful.
I open up my email, and check for a message from the WordPress pluging “Jetpack” letting me know when the site went down – one hell of a useful service, as you can imagine, and one I generally recommend to any WordPress user.
Sure enough, I find such an email… from 8 P.M. last night. By the time I got up and really checked, Xadara had been down for 15 hours!
“https://www.xadara.com did not load when we checked on Tuesday, June 26, 8:06 pm.
Your site is responding intermittently, or extremely slowly. This can indicate an overloaded, under-powered, or misconfigured server. Your site is probably loading for some users, but not for everyone. “
I quickly logged into the website to check the server. My immediate thought was someone had gotten ticked about something I had said and had done whatever they could to take down the site, which to some may seem like an extreme worry, but is a concern for most any website owner – especially one expressing honest opinions that might be contrary to the current flow of public opinion.
Thankfully, this wasn’t the case. Instead it looks like a much more simple case of something being wrong with the storage on the server – the server volumes that showed in my cpanel were all listed as down, or suffering some kind of error. Don’t know what, don’t know why.
Whatever case, it took the site down for a solid 15 hours, longer than it has ever been down since switching to HostGator in 2008. It wasn’t just down then up, oh no, it was down completely for the 15 hours, as I didn’t have a single hit registered during that time span.
The funny thing is just as soon as I get in the server and begin to check on this, I get an email from Jetpack letting me know the site was active, and confirming it was down for 15 hours.
“Good news — your site https://www.xadara.com is now loading!
Your site was down for approximately 15 hours, but is up again as of Wednesday, June 27, 11:32 am.
We will continue monitoring your site, and alert you if it goes down again. “
Wonderful. Just wonderful. Well, at least it’s up!
Now, what I want to know is this: is this a fluke? Is this a one-off situation, or am I going to begin dealing with this more and more often? While I’m generally happy with Hostgator, I do wonder what another host might offer me for my money, and if I experience much more site downtime, to where I couldn’t prepare an article to later publish if I even wanted to during this, well, that’s a problem.
The funny thing? Last night I was going to get an article or two out, but decided against it. Had I gone to the site to write something, I certainly would have seen this and had quite a night trying to figure it out, so it’s probably better I didn’t actually see this until this morning. This has kind of killed the planned article I had for this morning, but that’s okay. I can get that article written tonight, and then prepare some other stuff for tomorrow…
That is, if the server doesn’t go down again.