Our apologies for the significant downtime today. We ended up making an emergency move to a new web hosting company. We could tell the site was running poorly last night and eventually stopped working altogether for a few hours. Then by morning time the front end (the side our readers see) was functional and scheduled posts still went up, but we were locked out of any admin capabilities. Then it went down altogether.
After some troubleshooting and work and talking with the hosting company, they explained what was going on. Because of high traffic and server load, the server had automatically shut down Voices a few times. They decided they were not going to reconnect our WordPress install to our domain name on the shared hosting setup we were currently running.
As background, Dave had talked with Tony Kummer a while back about taking over the hosting and domain name since Tony’s not really involved day-to-day. He mostly gets a phone call when the site goes down. Tony agreed with that but we’d never actually taken the steps to make it happen. As it became more clear what was happening today, it seemed natural to go ahead and make that transition since the hosting plan was going to be moving anyway.
Thankfully we had an automated backup that completed late last night, so we didn’t (that we know of) lose any posts or comments from before the site was taken down. (Some comments left today got scrubbed when we did a second restore to iron out some bugs. Glitches, I hear they’re called.)
Transitioning to a new hosting company isn’t terribly difficult but there are a few bumps here and there. We had one issue with a security certificate (new feature, BTW), but we think that’s resolved. One plugin was causing some problems but I think we’ve got that ironed out too. You may see problems here or there in site operation, feel free to let us know.
We’re going to do everything we can to make sure we’re up and running over these next two weeks especially. #SBC18 is just around the corner. And thank you guys for burning the server down.
