But thankfully we got another one. Reef Builders is back online after going through a lot for the past 48 hours. Normally, things don’t happen like this here, and we we’re all very shocked to discover that the site was having major issues Tuesday night. The issue stemed from the Raid5 array that we run on our server, for those of you in the tech world you know exactly what I’m talking about. For those of you not, lets just say that it gives us more stablity in the online world. Anyway, the RAID5 array went bad. Granted the site was still up, or some what at that point but it was throwing up these nasty server errors. Come to find out a hard drive went out. No problem, this sort of thing is Raid5’s speciality.
We got on the phone with our server hosting company and thought it would be taken care of. Which it was. However, when the new hard drive was loaded on the server there were bad stripes on the hard drives. The only way in which to clean this up was to completely wipe the server clean and then re-load a backup of some kind. We were going to do this, however, we didn’t want to risk wiping out the data and reloading the backups without first moving the backups onto another server. The data this website has and allows thousands of visitors to read, access and learn from was too important for us to consider doing this.
So we got another server. And if you’re reading this post this page was rendered with the new server. Not only did we get a new server we got a new host as well. The new company will allow us to focus more on being bloggers and less time being concerned about uptime, backups, Raid arrays and other things I really have no interest in thinking about.
I can’t belive it was a full 48 hours before we got the site fully fixed. But it was worth it. It needed to be done and thank goodness we are finally past it. I would like to personally apoligze for any inconvenience this might have caused you, your friends and other reef builders. We know how important Reef Builders is to the thousands of readers that read us every day and without each one of you, this wouldn’t be possible.
-Reef Builders Staff
