You want to know why the site went down? Isn't it enough that it's back?
I lost the backup drive a couple of months ago, so nightly backups haven't been happening to a separate drive for some time.
Back in August or September, I bought four matched boxes (HP DC7100s, circa 2005) to replace the 1999-vintage hardware that I built to host the data back then. Over the years I average one HDD failure per year, and now after so much uptime various fans and power supplies are reaching end-of-life and giving me trouble, so when I had an opportunity to buy a bunch of newer, matched hardware, I did so.
Bought some new, big HDDs too. And software to upgrade the base OS.
However, life intrudes, and much of this has just been sitting in the server room. The "new" hardware is nowhere near ready to deploy.
Then, last week the main server's data drive developed four bad blocks, and that shut down the site. It took me several nights to get that rectified. That drive is still in use as I type. I *do* have backups to a separate drive running nightly again, though, but only of the site and not of the supporting data or pics.
Since I'm not ready to migrate everything to the "new" hardware, I have to keep the old hardware in place. So, I bought a couple of brand-new WD 500GiB PATA HDDs today (one for the server, one for the backup). But since almost everything I built back in the day is SCSI, I found I don't have any of the 80-wire PATA cables these things require (only 40-wire cables), so I can't add the new HDDs tonight. Perhaps tomorrow night. I don't like IDE, never have, but as a stopgap this is the cheapest "new drive" solution I can put into place on the non-SATA-supporting antique servers. I hope.
All this is by way of saying that I *am* working on the various problems, and that it's failing hardware that's to blame. When I built all this stuff, I was a lot younger, had more time to indulge these hobbies, and I bought very good quality stuff. However, 24/7 operation for eleven years is really pushing it.
The "new" DC7100s aren't new either, but have a lot less hours on them. I'll have to strip out all the fans and replace them, as I am hearing too much noise from them. The drives will be all new. The CPUs are about three times faster, but I don't really need more HP on the server end of things; nothing that happens here requires more than the 1Ghz Athlons I bought over a decade ago. The DSL outbound isn't fast enough to stress the old server's throughput, not even close. But my distributed.net parallel processing numbers are going to go up by a whole bunch
And the old Athlons are very power hungry; I use them to heat that end of the house! The DC7100s require a lot less cooling -- I hope.
I trust that this gives you some insight into why the site is not always up 100% of the time. Even with thousands invested in hardware (UPS batteries are one of my biggest recurring expenses), this isn't a mission-critical sort of operation. I have received ONE donation in the past 14 months, so this is all out-of-pocket and then there's the time involved in just maintenance. I try to keep up with it, but there are days when I have to call it a night and head for bed; 5am comes early.
Expect more downtime. Be patient. Be well.