Hi,
Maybe it's just me, but it's been almost a week that I can't connect to http://www.lhotka.net.
?????
Luc
Hi,
Maybe it's just me, but it's been almost a week that I can't connect to http://www.lhotka.net.
?????
Luc
The site has been down a few times over the past 10 days or so, but only for short intervals - due to:
That’s true – the site goes down automatically every
night for a server backup. Of course “night” is relative –
and I have it go down in MY night :)
Rocky
From: Kevin Fairclough
[mailto:cslanet@lhotka.net]
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2008 10:31 AM
To: rocky@lhotka.net
Subject: Re: [CSLA .NET] RE: Main CSLA.NET web site down ?
In the UK, the main site often goes down (or is down) in the
morning (UK time between 9am & ??12 maybe.) The forum is up nearly
all the time.
a server backup.. and the site goes down?
communityserver cms doesn't require to go down for an backup, and ofcourse sqlserver doesn't have to go down.
So it must be something by the current hosting machine, Magenic?
Maybe it's an idea just to host the site on another machine or location which doesn't need to go down?
The server is down due to a software failure with virtual server, and I'm working to resolve the issue.
www.lhotka.net is currently hosted on my personal server. I've been burned in the past by hardware failures, where I've had to waste days reinstalling the OS, reinstalling and reconfiguring all the various software running on the server - blogs, wikis, source control, etc.
forums.lhotka.net is hosted on a server at Magenic, because I don't have the bandwidth to handle it.
So some time ago I settled on a solution that (thus far) has been proof against catastrophe. My server is a virtual machine. Every night (my time) the VM is shut down and the vhd's are copied to another directory, then the VM restarts. Then the vhd's are copied to an external HD. Every couple weeks a copy is also made to an external HD that is effectively offsite. Oh, and the physical server's HD is mirrored.
The backup scheme used by Magenic is similar, and is motivated by a similar desire to avoid hard failure scenarios.
Is this ideal? Probably not. But I am not an IT pro guy. Nor do I make money off the framework, the forum, my blog, etc. Sure, I have some ads, and they just barely pay for the DSL service - they dont' generate enough revenue to pay for hosting a virtual machine somewhere - not even close.
To be blunt, I am sorry if it makes the framework feel "unprofessional". For me this is a labor of love. I put ridiculous amounts of time and money into this framework so I can give it to you for free. But I can't justify spending thousands of dollars on hosting services unless I can come up with a way to pay for those services. That money would come directly out of my family budget otherwise, and you can probably see where that makes no sense.
In fact, I'm switching my hosting to Magenic's servers entirely in the near future, because I don't find enough value hosting in my home any longer. For years it has been fun - a learning experience about aspects of Windows I don't normally deal with (security, configuration, backups, etc). But as time goes on, I find the value decreasing and the PITA factor increasing, so I'm going to move my virtual machine to their servers. That'll save me DSL bandwidth, and a few hundred dollars a year in electricity.
But Magenic's virtual machine backup scheme is essentially the same as mine - a nightly copy of the vhd's to an external location - so I'm afraid the daily downtime won't change in any meaningful way...
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