As I no doubt suspect a few people other than myself noted last week, my site was basically completely down for the last week. This was, to say the least, incredibly inconvenient, since I was without e-mail, unable to post to this blog, among other things.

My hosting is currently through MJZ Hosting, a very small company with pretty amazingly low rates. I'm paying less than a dollar a week for 1 GiB of storage and 30 GiB of traffic every month. An extra five dollars a year, grants me SSH access. I have as many Databases as I want. As many subdomains as I want. And as many e-mail addresses I want. It's an amazing deal. And it works.

Most of the time.

Apparently, the story is that Matthew, the owner of MJZ Hosting, has been in the hospital for a few weeks (I share this, because he did). While he had people who should have been able to reboot the server, they were apparently completely incommunicado all last week, costing Matt several customers. Now, I've not left MJZ Hosting yet. But, I did have a potential client that had tried to contact me last week. While I don't expect that bridge to have been burnt, it was still a bit of a wake-up call.

My website has been up somewhere around 99.9% of the time since I started hosting it with MJZ back around 2004. This is more than acceptable to me, when the downtime is spread out, but this last week has left me questioning whether I'm going to be continuing with MJZ when my contract is up in a few months. On the one hand, reliability is important, particularly when I'm beholden to someone else (even if they have been really good to me over the years), so I'm going to at least be considering other options.

In the meantime, I'm going to pick up where I left off. With roughly four posts a week, of things that I hope my readership finds useful and interesting. With any luck, we won't see any more substantial downtime.