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 You may have noticed that the JoeJoomla site and forums have been missing for several days. A case of ghostly disappearance perhaps, after all, Halloween is upon us. This is the trick or treat time of the year where the 'treat' part is preferred over the 'trick' part. I don't think it was a Halloween trick but it was indeed a nightmare.
After a year of pretty solid hosting service from a particular supplier, joejoomla.com and several other sites that are maintained by yours truly, started to experience some significant downtime. The server that this domain resided on started to get sluggish and the hosting service decided to move the domain to another server to improve things. The exact opposite occurred. Suddenly the domain would go offline. At first it would be for small periods of time, minor inconveniences here and there, and then the offline time got longer and longer.
During the early period of troubles I was in regular communication with the owner of the hosting business. He was working hard doing whatever needed to be done to get things back online. He explained what he thought some of the problems were; a new sever, a misconfiguration, an error, whatever. Then as things got worse and worse, you could feel the exasperation from his end as this obviously impacted his workload and nervous system.
'You are more understanding than many of my other customers' he told me as several of his clients started to jump to other hosting services. He has been a good supplier and this is one of those unfortunate times that nobody wants to experience I thought to myself, I'll tough it out and stick with him. If it were me I'd really appreciate it. So I hung in there, checking to see if the site was online every half hour or less. I fielded lots of inquiries, in person, from personal messages and emails, about what is happening with JoeJoomla and other sites that were on the server that I maintain. I figured the heat that the supplier is getting is a lot worse than what I am getting from everyone. Hang in there, this will be resolved soon.
Then he got harder to get in touch with. Once again the site goes offline. It's Wednesday night, and by Friday it's still offline. I get a personal message from him and he says 'I really hate to have to tell you this, but I think you should find a new hosting service'.
'What!?' I reply, 'Are you sure about this?'
'Yeah, I wouldn't have stuck around this long if it was me, I appreciate your support, but things haven't gotten any better'
He explains to me what some of the causes of his woes are, many of them out of his ability to rectify since he depends on others to physically make things right, and they still aren't going right. I feel really bad for him. I feel really bad for me too! Now the hard reality of sourcing out new hosting services for joejoomla.com and other domains takes top priority on my already heavily prioritized to-do list.
Today is Sunday, a half a week in the merciless world of the Internet since the site went offline. I've spent a lot of hours transferring files from one place to another, setting up domains and configuring databases for several sites. They are all happening in the order of importantance. Unfortunately while JoeJoomla is near the top of the list, there are several others that needed to be revived sooner. Finally, today the main joejoomla.com website is up and hopefully the forums, where most of the traffic takes place, will follow shortly. The old server is still offline. It doesn't matter anymore, I feel like I'm in that weird place between world's, kind of like when Neo from the Matrix was stuck in the subway station. Like Neo, I'll make progress and finally be back in a familiar place again.
There were a lot of Halloween parties around town last night but I was having my own personal Halloween nightmare. Hopefully you'll be back, and you are if you are reading this, and realize that JoeJoomla didn't disappear into the night, or that Freddy Kruger didn't do him in and dispose of him somewhere. I know that there are some people that really enjoy popping into the forums and having a little fun socializing with fellow Joomlers from different parts of the planet. I apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused you. I really hope things will soon settle down to normal.
Happy Halloween.
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