The Joys of a Two Day Server Outage
Regular readers will have noticed that my blog has been inaccessible for two whole days. This was caused by a scheduled file maintenance operation that went wrong when one of the other users on my shared host having 12 million files in his account which made the file maintenance overrun somewhat!
Anyway the natural thing to do would be to whine and rant about it but instead of that I chose to focus on what has been good about it.
More Free Time
No blog access means that there are no comments to moderate and no new emails from my contact form for those two days. Now I actually enjoy my daily ritual of answering emails and comments but it was also nice to have a break from it for a couple of days. Plus as it happened, on the day that the blog went down (Monday) my partner took an unexpected day off so we had a lovely day together without me having to worry about work. It’s nice when things work out like that.
Justified Procrastination!
The last thing I was working on before the weekend was working up to building some web 2.0 pages on sites like Squidoo and HubPages to promote my ebook. For some reason I kept procrastinating on this job and with the blog being down I was forced to procrastinate further because the content for those pages comes from an older post that of course I did not have access to.
Well technically that’s not quite true as I get my blog emailed to me daily by my backup plugin so I could have installed the blog locally, extracted the database and got to the post but that’s way too much hassle when faced with the far easier option of simply procrastinating for another day! :D
Downtime to Think
Usually I think a lot but sometimes I get so caught up in the doing that I forget to make time to think. I’m so busy responding to emails, writing blog posts, trying to stay caught up with other blogs, catching up on Blog Mastermind, finding time to do a little stumbling, etc etc that I forget to just sit and think about the future and where I am going.
I like to be constantly evaluating what I am doing, and where I am going. I examine my feelings on a subject to see if they give me good vibes or not. One project that I have mentioned a couple of times recently (in comments mainly I think) is that I am considering developing a course as taught by the Teaching Sells program.
However there was something about the idea that was niggling at me; something about the subject matter I had chosen just didn’t feel right. It has been bugging me for weeks, which is why I have not got started on the project in earnest. Today I’ve been on my own in the house with not a lot to do so I’ve spent a couple of hours just mulling ideas over in my head and it has worked wonders! I suddenly came up with the breakthrough idea that I needed to move forward with this project.
I’m going to talk about the project on this blog but in the interests of keeping myself focused and not trying to juggle too many things at once I have two tasks to complete before I start. Firstly I want to wrap up my ebook project and secondly I’m going to do a quick project which will involve me developing a newsletter for this blog. I plan to start work on my course around the beginning of March.
Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder?
Well I’ve been away from the blogosphere for two whole days so I’m sure my audience is just pining for me now so I expect to see a massive rush of traffic once this goes live!
Okay maybe not the last point :-)
Anyway it’s good to be back on the air and to those that asked me, no I’m not rushing to dump BlueHost - they screwed up, they are aware of it, we all make mistakes and other than this glitch they have been great. However should they screw up again, I will be looking for a new host!
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Stumble it!
Hendry Lee
February 12, 2008
BlueHost said that it was a file system problem that could take 1 hour. I checked it when you posted at Tweeter that it only affected 5 or 6 domains. It is a surprised that it took that long to get up running again.
But great to see your site up again.
-Hendry
Hendry Lee’s last blog post..Using Titles Effectively on Podcast and Episode Pages