This site was down most of the day due to technical problems with the system that hosts it.

I’m usually fairly patient about these things, since I work in the IT industry and I know that things sometimes break.  But the key to managing it is to keep the customer informed about what’s happening.

My hosting company has an automated system that monitors the status of all of the services that run on the system.  I was able to determine from the status page that the site was completely down for about 30 minutes.  However, once the server processes were restarted, Apache was having problems because it did not have enough space in /tmp to create session files (or so it appears).  So despite their system thinking that the server was up and functional, it actually wasn’t.  This meant that I had to submit a problem request to get them to look at the problem again. 

I’ve been with this company for a couple of years now and I’m generally happy with their service.  However, I’m becoming concerned because this same problem happened about a month ago.  Having multiple occurrences of the same problem can be a sign of deeper process-related issues.