That’s all I want. A machine that is indestructible. Parts that never go bad. Functions at 110% at all times, no matter what type of abuse we throw at it.

One of our servers that serve up many of our client sites had itself a little breakdown this week. We noticed some real strange behavior on Thursday evening. We ran our usual batch of checks on all the software, which all checked out perfectly. No wayward scripts, no badly formed code, no specific site with high volumes of traffic using up the majority of the processes, no DDOS attempts, nothing out of the ordinary.

Up all hours of the night trying to nurse this machine through it’s crisis – at some point, we ran memchecks on the system and discovered total failure, telling us that it was most likely a hardware issue. A quick check with the box guys confirmed this. Last night, we replaced and upgraded the RAM on the box – - tossed the old RAM into the garbage heap, and all seems to be well and good.

We had about 35 mins of downtime during the upgrade, which isn’t bad, and not as long as we had anticipated it would be. I just want to note the we just have some of the most fantastic set of clients in the existance of the universe. Downtime is absolutley frustrating for every single person involved, even us! We are just as affected by the downtime – as many of our own sites are hosted on this particular box. The patience, understanding and loyalty expressed to us by many of our clients during this time was really super!

There is nothing more nerve-wreaking than having server issues that affect client sites. I want to be able to do exactly what needs doing, and I want it done NOW so the client sites are not effected by the back-end goings on with the servers. Unfortunately, sometimes downtime for maintenance is unavoidable, at best. Frustration mounts, understandably – however, many of our clients were right there with us, understanding and patient and happy to have the updates and the communication about what was going on behind the scenes.

I know from personal experince, back in the days when I hosted my sites on someone elses servers – - the one thing that was most important to me during times like this is communication about what is going on. Sometimes, that communication is not as quickly doled out as I’d like it to be, because it does take a certain amount of time to run the maintenance checks – - but as soon as we know what is going on, how it’s going to be fixed and an estimated time frame on how long it will take.. I think that is the most important thing we can do for our clients during times like these. I know I sure appreciated that level of communication when I was a hosting client.

So, for any of my hosting clients reading this – - thank you for your patience and understanding, and from some of you – your words of encouragement and support. You guys are the best!