Sep 23 2008
Don’t put too many eggs in one server
Last night I came home from a 4 week road trip with my wife and daugther through Europe. Since my wife doesn’t have a license, I alone drove over 7000 kilometers. It really was an incredible trip though. We’ve seen alot of nice things.
I also managed not to think about work for a while there. But suddenly - probably due to feeling a disturbance in the SEO force - I felt a sudden need to check how my servers were doing only to find out that one of them was down. I checked some Analytics stats and it had been out for 1½ day. I tried to restart the server using my cell phone but the control panel had implemented some fancy AJAX thing for that particular control and the Opera Mobile Browser couldn’t cope with that. And when abroad cell phone traffic is crazy expensive. It’s like 10$/Mb or something - hate the networks for that.
Finally I called the support to have them restart the server for me.
Alltogether a downtime of three days. That’s not good at all and the really sad thing is that my most important projects are on that server.
What can I learn from this?
- Monitor my servers better, ie send mail/sms
- Spread the risks, not having large servers but several smaller ones
- Have plans made out to deal with these sort of things
It shall not happen again, I promise.
