Power failure cleaned up Sep13 '05

Yesterday afternoon, at about 3 PM CST/1 PM PDT, Dreamhost suffered a major power failure, and with it went thousands of web sites that it hosts, including a number of my own.

My blog is of little importance, so having that go down was, at least, not costing me money. But some other sites that I maintain are a bit more important, money-wise. Rest assured, Dreamhost kept everyone updated on the status of the situation, by using a completely separate emergency server - one that is far away from their main servers. Their blog also kept people informed.

So, for at least eight hours yesterday afternoon/evening, my sites were all but blank.

My email worked great - simply because I use GMail, these days - obviously not associated with Dreamhost.

An emergency like this really made me question about how prepared I am, in regards to backing up data. From now on, I will surely make more timely backups of my files and databases.

And... although it’s convenient to put everything with one company (email, sites, databases) - it’s often more beneficial to have your data scattered around with different sources. Simply because... Dreamhost went down in southern California, but Google did not - so my email was intact. Also, my .Mac account contains important files - and that, too, did not go down.

So, rather than have everything go down - at least I still had some functionality.

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matthom is published and produced by Matt Thommes - an independent publishing enthusiast, mobile blogger, content creator, informative writer, web developer from Chicago. Never one to conform, Matt intends to promote the effect the web has on our lives, in an effort to intensify, instruct, and clarify all that is happening around us.