Launching a new backup site

[annathepiper]

So after yet ANOTHER power outage this past weekend–which makes nine since August 2015, and so far once a month since June of this year–I have reached the point where I’m really sick and tired of my website not being available whenever the power goes out.

This has bitten me twice now when I’ve tried to run ads during 99 cent sales, only, SURPRISE! POWER OUTAGE! So your ads are pointing off to a page readers can’t get to!

Our neighborhood association, of which Dara is a member, is actually going to have a meeting with Puget Sound Energy on the 28th of this month to express our collective frustration with this ongoing state of affairs. I am not expecting fast action on this. So in the meantime, I am taking the precaution of setting up a minimal backup website that will contain the most critical data about me and my books.

That site is going up at angelahighland.wordpress.com. Angelahighland.com should still be considered my canonical website and the official source of data about all of my works. However, y’all should keep angelahighland.wordpress.com bookmarked, just in case you need to look up something about any of my titles, or maybe even point someone at buying them, and find you can’t get to my main site because our power went out again. I will be updating information on this site accordingly.

Because it will. It’s mid-September now, which means the 2016 fall storm season is imminent. We’ll have at least one more power outage before the end of the year, and I won’t be surprised if we have more.

Any questions, let me know!

Mirrored from angelahighland.com.

Comments

[alinsa.livejournal.com]

You may actually consider getting a VPS somewhere for running the various websites ... smallish ones can be really cheap (like, < $10), and even big ones can be affordable -- I have a 4CPU/8GB server in AWS with a couple hundred gigs of disk space that costs like $60/month.

Not free, but certainly does make a lot of problems into non-problems.

[annathepiper]

Not really a viable course of investigation at the moment, I think. For a few reasons:

1) Having a backup site on Wordpress.com, at their base level of access, is free. Free is kind of important at the moment, given that Dara and I are needing to spend several thousand this year on roof repair for MurkSouth, and there's also a non-zero likelihood that I'll need to have surgery on my nose in the near future.

2) We're already putting down over $125 a month for business-grade internet from Comcast. As part of this, we get access to web space on their systems. So if I were to try to really make us some backups of our websites that could kick in during a power outage, that'd actually be my first course of investigation. We're already throwing them considerable amounts of money, and we get features for that that we're not currently utilizing. It'd be more cost-effective for us to try to utilize some of that functionality.

3) Either way, the problem would still remain that angelahighland.com and crimeandtheforcesofevil.com, as well as the various other sites we host, would still have their DNS fucked up by a power outage. And given how there's always lag on DNS changes propagating out across the Net, even if a VPS got us the ability to have our domains shift over in the event of an outage (I don't know if that's possible?), it might not happen fast enough to be actually useful. We have a lot of power outages, but they are rarely over 36 hours in duration. That's almost too narrow a time to bother with anything that could redirect our domains and redirect them back again once the lights came back on.

Of course, ideally, Puget Sound Energy could just get its shit together and stop having nine outages in a year. :P But until that happens, for now, a backup site on Wordpress.com was the fastest and cheapest solution I could come up with for the problem, at least for my own personal website. Dara and I will talk about what to do about the other sites we host.

[eeyorerin]

Would it ultimately be more cost-effective for you to just put the server in a colocation facility or host your sites on a virtual server somewhere with reliable uptime and downgrade your home Internet?

[annathepiper]

Maybe. But it'd also run us the risk of losing the level of functionality we actually want. Dara and I LIKE having our own servers and doing our own DNS.

Edited to add: Also, the business-grade level of internet we're paying for from Comcast is our best way to get service from them that is usually not going to suck. If we kick down to a residential tier of access from them, our support is likely to be substantially worse and our bandwidth will go down as well. Which would be suboptimal given that Dara and Paul both like to play a lot of Overwatch, which does require an active internet connection, and we wind up streaming a lot of stuff we watch on TV as well.

Comcast tech support has worsened considerably over the last few years, even for the business-grade accounts, and I get a headache just thinking about having to deal with the support for their residential tier. :P