APOLOGIES: Mega-outage for our otherwise-reliable longtime server-management company

Please accept our apologies for WSB being inaccessible for three-plus hours – if you missed our explanation on social-media channels, our server-management company WiredTree suffered some kind of catastrophic outage. It affected many sites as well as ours – we were able to see by monitoring Twitter mentions that we were far from alone. WiredTree hasn’t fully explained it yet, but the company is usually spectacularly reliable and responsive, and has been for the 8+ years we have been with them. We do have backup sites that we would have deployed if this had gone on any longer, or if there had been a major breaking story (luckily it was a quiet afternoon aside from the downpours) – including our White Center site, whitecenternow.com, whose server is with a different company, and the westseattleblog.wordpress.com backup site we used during our technical transition last winter. But now we’re back, so we’ll be publishing the stories we were working on when the site became inaccessible, soon as they’re ready – thanks again for your patience.

rw October 26, 2016 (6:06 pm)

No apologies necessary — just very glad to have you back.

JetCityElectro October 26, 2016 (10:11 pm)

Both name servers on the same IP? No site redundancy? I may be just an unfrozen caveman sysadmin, but back in my time putting all your eggs in one basket was highly frowned upon.

WSB October 26, 2016 (10:21 pm)

Available to consult? Great technical help is exceptionally hard to find. We’ve evolved a lot over a decade-plus to where we’re at now with lots of expert help along the way but if there’s something we should be doing better, we’re always interested in hearing it. In our ninth year with WiredTree, this is the first time anything remotely resembling this has happened. – TR