[rjsmerigan]

i was unable to access my site on 3/1/2004 . . . i also could not get to chrisboylan.com or amberkmiller.com . . . everything seems to be back to normal now . . . any insight to what caused these problems?

[Chris]

Ron -- sorry for not contacting you earlier, but the datacenter where the server is located went down for awhile. Here's the quote from the datacenter's website:

Beginning on Saturday, Feb. 28th and continuing through Monday, March 1st the BurstNet network experienced extended periods of downtime. The outages appear to have been caused by multiple variables in several facilities. During the outages, extensive testing, maintenance, and replacement of gear in our Scranton facility, in our Philadelphia facility, and in our fiber providers facilities was performed. Much of this maintenance is only possible during a total outage such as this. Possible problematic pieces of equipment and cabling were found in all facilities, including the apparent cause of the recent packet loss issues over the last 2 months (my tests show 0% packet loss since restoring of service this evening). The basic summary is that our fiber provider had gear that needed to be swapped out due to errors, and we had one piece of network gear and 2 fiber cables that also showed errors. It is basically impossible to exactly pinpoint which piece caused the issue. Likely, any one of these by themself would have caused difficult to track and diagnose issues (such as low-level packet loss) but, when combined, seemed to trigger this weekends outages. We apologize for the large inconvenience, and thank our customer base for their patience.

Basically, this server and a few thousand others were inaccessible at times over the weekend. I've looked into moving the server somewhere else, but I can't do it (pricewise) with the current amount of customers. In addition, this company has had a good record until now. I'm sorry it was down, and it hopefully will not happen again. A month ago, they ordered another backup line that should help when it is installed in the next few weeks.