Written by PatrickJ on Sunday, March 2, 2008

Message for Gear Diary Readers


GDlogo

All of us on the JAMM team are avid readers of Gear Diary.  It’s a top favorite among favorites and a place we enjoy going every day. 

And this weekend we’re missing it, badly!

If you’ve tried to get to Gear Diary’s site today, you know that they have had a horrific experience this weekend with their web hosting company, been forced to switch to a new host, and are currently working very hard at getting their site back up as quickly as possible.

Just a little more detail on what’s occurred to lead to these problems: yesterday morning, GD’s hosting company suffered a ‘massive server crash’ causing Gear Diary and lots of others to suddenly find their sites unreachable. From the look of things so far, the hosting company not only failed to have adequate systems in place to react and recover from a server crash, but they have also failed miserably in terms of communicating in any worthwhile way with their customers during their crisis – see this thread for more (shocking lack of) details.

We have had outages and troubles relating to our hosting company here at JAMM in the past, but nothing as severe and catastrophic (touch wood) as what GD are going through this weekend.  I know how horrible and helpless you feel when these things occur, especially when you cannot even get a decent update on what the **** is going on during an outage.  It’s shameful that a company is behaving that way towards their paying customers!

Anyway, we are all hoping that Judie and her team at GD will soon have their site back up at a new host and will get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and will be able to recover data held at the old company as well.

We’d also like to just send our very best wishes and thoughts out to Judie and her team during this *incredidbly* stressful time, and hope you will do the same.  So sorry this has happened – and looking forward to seeing Gear Diary back real soon …

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9 Comments

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maceyr
Mar 2, 2008

I was wondering what was happening since I haven’t been getting much news lately and thanks for the heads up!

I hope Judie and co will get back online soon!


dgoldring
Mar 2, 2008

As many of you know, in addition to my work here at JAMM, I am also a frequent contributor over at Gear Diary. I can tell you that I have spoken with Judie at length about this, and there is no word to describe the feeling over there except extreme frustration (well, no other words that I can print here). Judie, and the rest of the folks at GD, are committed to getting the site back up and running as quickly as possible. I know I feel a little bit of a loss without it there, and I suspect a lot of you do too. :(

Doug


Aczon
Mar 2, 2008

See what happen! I warned them several times to make sure to pick my name every time they have those daily contest, but noooooooooooooo. They don’t listen! Now I hacked their server, and its down until I get a confirmation email from Judie that I have won!!!

:P

Hey Judie, hope everything will be up soon. Missed GD already!


JDTagish
Mar 3, 2008

I can only imagine the words that can’t be used here!

No worries from the reader end – we’ll all be back as soon as the site is up again.

All good thoughts going to Judie & the team!


Augie
Mar 3, 2008

I’m sorry to hear about that. I hope all is not lost. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?


spmwinkel
Mar 3, 2008

I see GD is back, glad to see that!


Peter
Mar 3, 2008

Judie and the team Have GD up and running, YAY. For about two and a half hours, whilst the clean up still continues, they’re Online! :)


Judie
Mar 3, 2008

Thanks so much you all – I guess you can imagine how frustrating and disappointing this weekend has been…but I will try to lay out everything that occurred in a post tomorrow (later today, as it is now 5am). If our experience helps one other webmaster / site, then it won’t have been in vain.

In the meantime, be sure to read the latest in that thread.

http://forum.hostican.com/virtual-private-servers-vps/838-vps-problems-seems.html

I don’t know how long HostICan’t will leave it in place, but let it serve as a cautionary tale. I certainly feel for the poor guy whose site was featured on CNN…that would be the next worse thing to being knocked back into June 2007 as we were. ((deep breaths))

THANK YOU for your support!! :-)


dgoldring
Mar 3, 2008

Well, all is not lost, but quite a bit was. In talking with Judie last night, it sounds like about six months of news and posts is lost right now. :( That is a lot of hard work, and quite frustrating. Hopefully we can piece together a lot of the rest.

For now though, I think there will be a lot of forward thinking. Like Judie said in her post at GD, it is like getting hit by a tornado. We are recovering what we can and moving forward from there.

Doug

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