Purify. You and I. PURIFY!

So it all happened Sunday. I was at work in the Children’s department, Vivian had just brought me a colour book and crayons out of the blue for no real reason, I went to show her something on Jux…and the page was up, and Kenny had said something new on it. A short while later, after she had left, I went back to Jux to see what he had posted as a news post, and I got a ‘could not connect’ error.

Jux was down. It’s happened before. No big deal, right?

Later that night, Jux still wasn’t up. Not only that, but instead of just not connecting, it had been replaced with a “home of your future site!” page, which I’m sure many of you saw. Now I was frightened. This is the week I normally do backups, but I hadn’t yet, which meant that our last backup was from a week before. If Jux’s data had been lost, then everything after that month had gone with it. Kenny also informed me that he had lost his copy of the Feature Poster when he reformatted his harddrive. That, too, would have died with Jux.

It was at this point that I tried to contact our host, who for now shall remain nameless. Only after going to their support forums did I find a message saying that all the sites on our server were going to be moved, although we shouldn’t be expecting any sort of service outage. At this point I’m already thinking that it was great of them to do something like this and not bother to inform any of the sites they host except on a message board where there are only a few messages a week from the entire community; a board not checked often by anyone. But since it was a support forum, I decided to ask what the status of Jux was. The reply: “Oh wow, something’s going on with the server.”

At least that response was fast. In the future I wouldn’t be so lucky. Monday rolled around with Kenny and I, the only Juxers to be around to know of the site being down, worried sick over our data and the fact that our site had been taken down for the first time ever and there wasn’t a thing we could do about it. One of the reasons we went with the host we did was because it was smaller and was supposed to have a greater sense of “community” and “flexibility”, yet, we had no idea this was going on.

When Monday did come, I saw a message saying that everything had been fixed. The new server had had some problems after the move. All well and good, but Jux still wasn’t up. It was technically early Monday morning, and I both emailed and posted a new message on the forum, asking what we needed to do (or what was being done) to get Jux back online. The good news, at this point, was that apparently our data was safe, even though I couldn’t prove that myself.

It took over twelve hours for our host to respond to my email. Pretty bad for “community” and “care”, eh? And when he did reply, it was a quick one-line answer of: “You need to change your DNS to blah.” I realize that not every one of his customers uses external DNS servers, but shouldn’t he have informed those that do that they would need to change their DNS info? If I had been informed of this in advance, Jux’s downtime would have been one day instead of two. No such luck though, not even in any of the forum warning messages, which no one reads in the first place remember, were the new IP’s mentioned. I didn’t get so much as an apology for the extended downtime of Jux either. Apparently, not reading his mind is our fault.

DNS servers take up to 24 hours to propagate changes. Thus why we’re just now coming up, and probably still down for some of you.

Now, I realize he didn’t intend for his server to go down. I also realize that this isn’t his full time job. But when I’m paying you for a service, I expect to receive it. I would have been happy with Jux being down this long if I had felt like he was trying to correct the matter, or if he had assured us of the data being down, or whatever. As it is, our host seems to have taken on the worst parts of a small host (lack of personnel and slow contact) with the worst parts of a large host (lack of caring about customers, lack of individual communication) and rolled them into something that is really no longer serviceable. When I add this to the fact that several of the services we’re supposed to have, like our mailserver, have never worked correctly despite being “fixed” several times, and the startling lack of administrative control that I’m supposed to have that requires to do several things the long way, I realize that Jux just can’t work with this host anymore.

Yes, at some point in the future, Jux will be moving. I think I’ve found a better host for us, and Kenny has approved of it as well. Since we’re the Jux technical crew, that’s all the go ahead we really need. To avoid the headaches of moving right before I leave, however, Jux will remain on its current host until August. And to make the transition smooth when we do move, we’re going to keep our current host up as a mirror for an entire month during the move, just in case some of the name servers are super-ultra slow to update 😉 Should we go down for an extended period of time again, however, the move would come sooner…come hell or high water.

I wish our current host the best of luck, which is why I have refrained from mentioning the name here. Plus, while we have had little outages recently, this is the first major downtime Jux has had in well over a year of operating, so it’s not like this is a current thing. If it was, I wouldn’t be comfortable with waiting until August to move. There are just some problems that we can no longer accept. Ultimately, we need more. Once Jux moves, you can expect better service, speed, and a few new (site) features. And isn’t that better for everyone?

The funny comes back tomorrow.