Last night, after wrapping up a long day at work, I was greeted by 4 e-mails that in some context included the two words I hate the most:
Site Down
The site they were referring to was the EMS Blogs network. Not to get into too many finite details, but one of the posts on the network yesterday proved quite popular. While the blog itself is cache protected from traffic surges, the third party commenting system was not.
This caused an unexpected burden on the server, which then automatically shut the network down for 73 minutes while the plugin was disabled and the server reset. Our traffic loss was probably around 400 visitors during that time, which is a significant amount for any blogger or network. Of course, there’s the big picture to look at. Being down for 73 minutes of the month is actually 0.2% of the time which is actually really really good.
Even that doesn’t change the fact that I hate those two words. I hate them because I know, especially when it comes to the network, that other people’s expression is dependent on my ability to resolve that problem. Then again… that does make them just like a patient.
