Anyone who has tuned in over the last week will probably have noticed that the site has been playing up a bit. I noticed it myself recently. Every so often at random the site would become unreachable for anything from minutes to hours. And anyone who tried to visit yesterday would have found the site totally unreachable. Basically the server folded. That’s it in a nutshell. I don’t know why and I don’t know how, but it did. It just pulled down its pants and collapsed.
And unless you’re happy surfing the web as a series of blank white pages that each take 3 minutes to load, servers imploding is not a good thing. I didn’t think it was a good thing either. Luckily I had taken a backup. And I have to admit that although I do back up my data it’s not something I do perhaps as often as I should; so the fact that this is the second time things have gone into meltdown right after a full backup is surely some kind of omen. The gods of the internet reminding me who’s boss.
So anyway I still had to deal with the fact that the site was down and I had to do something about it. So I did. I switched servers. To cut a long and boring story short I stayed up waay past my bedtime fiddling around to get the site back up and online… from my flat in Glasgow I moved the site from somewhere in Texas to Portland Oregon. If you want to get technical about it, Burning Salad now comes to you via the Time Warner internet backbone from a Duel Xeon Dell PowerEdge server.
Anyway, I’m just really happy that I managed to get it sorted out. It could have potentially gone so wrong. There will no doubt still be a few gremlins here and there so if you spot something wonky or find something broken, drop me a comment to let me know. (And if you emailed me over the last 48 hours, it went into a black hole… you’ll have to resend it.)