A New Place for my Stuff
Unbenownest to me, phoneboy.com went down for a period of time. I started getting messages from people on Twitter and Mastodon about it. Being on the road at the time, I didn’t have much time to look into it.
When I did get back home and had some cycles, I started looking into it. Turns out my VPS provider suffered a massive outage resulting in my site (and thousands of others) becoming unavailable. I opened a ticket, of course, but did not receive any response. I eventually found a notice on their website that offered some explanation, but it was lacking.
So, of course, I looked on Twitter and found a tweet that succinctly explained the situation:
Meanwhile, they are continuing to advertise their services on Twitter, and getting the expected upset customers responding.
The good news is that this particular site is relatively easy to host. It’s also backed up in a few places. It’s simple enough to host on an S3 bucket if I wanted to, but I’m an old Dude Named Ben and I like to have some direct control over what’s serving at least part of my overall web presence.
Thus, why I use a Virtual Private Server. It gives me an “online” place to put and experiment with stuff just beyond serving passive pages up. Also, it’s significantly cheaper, as you can find low-end VPSes for a few bucks a year. Since phoneboy.com doesn’t get the traffic it once did and I’m not putting out new content on it on a regular basis, I’d rather keep the operational costs low.
In any case, I found a new place for my stuff. Given the relatively low overhead required to host my site, both in terms of software required and required configuration, the site is now back online on a different host with just a couple hours of work and a LOT of file copying.
Like I said, I have backups in a few places. This helps a lot. Don’t learn this lesson the hard way like so many people do.
