Seems a hard drive cable came loose.... nothing lost. Sorry for the inconvenience. We are back up!

Another outage... Seems it's the hard drive itself is going bad. I thought ahead however, and when the server was purchased, I also purchased an extra hard drive, so I'm going to have to find some time to install this one. It'll be some work because it's the operating system drive that's dying.... so I'll have to re-install a fresh O/S on the new drive before doing the restore.

I'm not sure when I'll schedule this yet. Perhaps this friday during the day, or Saturday morning.

Sorry for the inconvenience!! If the site does down again, feel free to email me at revlis (at) vinocellar.com. My email is a separate system.

Thanks everyone.

Brad,

Have you given any thought to a hosted environment lately? I know you probably prefer self-hosted based on the direction you've gone to date and there are pros and cons to both directions but it seems to me you could go the hosted route and likely save some dough overall and hopefully minimize the outages.

I've considered it, but hard drive problems happen at hosted environments as well.

True. I was thinking more along the lines of 24/7 monitored service of redundant servers with RAID drives, redundant T1 lines, etc... A situation that increases the odds against downtime in a more cost effective package versus a similar environment that is self hosted. Just my personal experience to date and a personal preference.

I'm a cappy hamper!

In terms of performance the self-hosted site is much faster than some of the other sites. There are a couple of other sites that are slow at certain periods almost every day. I stop reading and posting at that point so it might adversely affect traffic.

On the other hand, if a site is down then there is no traffic at all so....

yea, wiml I certainly understand your point of view... and the argument can go back and forth for ages. I myself used to run a datacenter, and I know about power requirements, cooling requirements, all the different raid systems, redundant power supplies, etc.etc.... (the new HP machines are amazing btw) I know how beneficial it all can be, but only if you have the right people working with that technology. That can be difficult to find. Are they out there? Sure they are, but the main reason I keep everything self hosted is because of the extreme flexibility it offers.

I know exactly what traffic is on my T-1 line, I know exactly what's on my server (vinocellar.com!), I know exactly where the bottlenecks are, I know exactly what type of security I do or don't have, and I know what those configs are or aren't, and can change them at my whimsy, I have unlimited traffic and no extra fees based on this that or the other thing.... because I understand the big picture, I go crazy when I have to deal with things out of my control.

The flexibility I want remains with having direct access to the box and all of it's capabilities. Most hosters give you some type of front end system to manage your sql database and all website setup is done by them. (at extra cost) I however, can be directly on the box, move databases around, move code around, transfer from my dev machine to my prod machine at my whimsy without having to jump through hoops.... ftp, sftp, proprietary upload programs, etc... I can do what I want, when I want, how I want.... fast and efficiently. I can do backups how I want, restores whenever I want, etc., etc. Sure, some of these issues are handled better by some than others, but in general, if I had to jump through even just a couple of these hoops.... even less would get done on Vinocellar.

This is 90% of why I self-host. I'm a control freak I guess when it comes to this stuff.... potentially my biggest flaw. :-)

There's an inbetween solution to maintaining all your own hardware and the obnoxious interfaces of managed web hosting -- unmanaged virtual servers. They're cheap, you have broad hardware redundancy, but from a setup and maintenance POV it's like you have a brand-new box and you can do pretty much whatever you like with it. I'm just in the process of setting up a server with tektonic.net. For a site like this, where you have a fair amount of data on your bandwidth needs and whatnot, you might look at amazon's E2C server clouds.

Then again, it sounds like you've got a pretty good handle on this stuff. But for other projects, or users, unmanaged virtual servers are worth considering.