Sunpig.com was off the air for about nine hours from 2am (GMT) last night. Our site is histed with EZPublishing, whose are either resellers for Colossus.net, or they have their servers co-located at the same facility. Whatever the case, Colossus.net had a fire at their server facility last night. According to their recorded phone message, a power transformer exploded and set the cooling oil on fire.
The fire has been put out now, they have a backup transformer/generator in place, and their servers are starting to come back on-line again. It doesn’t look like we’ve lost any data on the web server, but I’m not sure what has happened to our incoming mail in the time that the server was out. If you’ve sent us anything in the last 12 hours, you might want to re-send it in case it got lost…
Note to self: must finish off those backup scripts…. I’ve got a script that creates a backup of our server database every day, but I haven’t got round to making it do anything useful with the backup afterwards…like email it to me, or FTP it to a different location. Fat lot of good that was going to be if the machine had gone up in flames. Keeping your backups on the same machine as your original files–or even in the same building–is about as useful as the proverbial chocolate teapot.