Several of my loyal blog readers emailed me this morning asking why they couldn’t access my web site or blog. There was a mysterious Error 403 that showed up when they tried to visit my site.
I verified that there was a problem and did my standard diagnostics. Nothing worked. It looked like my site had somehow been wiped clean.
I called my hosting service (GoDaddy.com) to investigate and the technician eventually found that there was “known problem” with their servers. They were working on it, she assured me, and would fix it as soon as possible. “Soon” turned out to be a long time. I checked periodically throughout the day and kept finding that it still hadn’t been fixed. This evening, I spent some time playing chess with my daughter and then checked again.
Fixed!
Finally.
As far as I can tell, my site was down for at least 12 hours. That is a record outage for me. GoDaddy has normally been very reliable. But today, they weren’t. 🙁
Postscript added 11/6/2008: A representative from GoDaddy emailed me personally today to apologize for the outage and to say that they are giving me a month’s free hosting on this site as compensation. That was certainly a very decent thing to do, and I thank them for it. I have a long history of working with GoDaddy to handle my web site needs, and I have found them to be generally quick and helpful in solving problems.
I thought about firing off an email too and asking ‘where did my favorite BLOG GO?? HUH??
Go Daddy = Bad Daddy. Bad, bad Daddy.
(Randy: How is your mother-in-law?)
Obviously they don’t have access to Sam the Plumber. However, you do, and if you didn’t send him over to GoDaddy you’ve only got yourself to blame.
However (again), you got to play chess with your daughter and she will remember that more than your stories of Sam the Plumber fixing your website.
You were fortunate that it was only twelve hours. Last June my server was down for four days. The last two days I kept being told the problem had been fixed. A lot of websites–including mine–got moved elsewhere after that. I guess it’s just one of those things that goes with the (modern) territory!
Kristi Holl
Writer’s First Aid blog
Oh–so that’s why! Well, I’m glad it’s back up.
Hannah
I was beginning to take it personally… wondering if Error 403 was code for, “I was able to secretly see what you have been writing for NaNoWriMo over the past few days and it was so terrible I decided to ban you from my blog!”
Whew. That’s a relief!
I was also a bit concerned, and feared you didn’t like us no more.
I’m glad to see it wasn’t a total loss and you’re up and running again.
Yeah, how’s your mother-in-law doing?
I was really wondering, but I figured it would be back up soon. Thankfully, I have NaNoWriMo too keep my busy at the moment.
Great sight here Randy, and it was just the find I needed today. Fiction has little to do with my own blog – as that blog’s about my other life.
But this week I dusted off a novel I wrote while researching and teaching for McGill, up in the high arctic. I’ve decided to spiffy up this novel and see if it has any merit after a few years hiding.
Not sure if anybody out there is interested in reading a story about how an Inuit teacher rattles a white leader’s world, when leadership threatens to destroy her sons’ learning in the High Arctic:-)
But I’d hoped to see what great fiction writers are saying and doing along the way. So I chose your blog as motivator:-) Hopefully I can support another writer or two while I’m here. Thanks for the cool site.
Randy, I hope your mother in law is well again now and am glad to see the wrinkles ironed out of your platform. That can be frustrating on a busy day!
I couldn’t get on your site because of the error and then we went away for a long weekend. I’m glad to be back home and also to see that everything got fixed.
Hope your MIL is doing well.