I hope you had a great holiday break! If you were in town and trying to access Ann Arbor with Kids, you probably ran into trouble. You weren’t alone. It has been a very frustrating 10 days as the site administrator. I tried to share some events and information via Facebook and the newsletter from what I could remember (with family in town I couldn’t recreate all of the content on the site).
The website’s e-mail account was also down with the site, so if you emailed me over break, there is a good chance that I never received the message.
So what happened? As Ann Arbor with Kids, I create the content, but need to store it someplace on the internet for you to access it. I work with a hosting company who manages my site on a third-party server.
The third-party server company where Ann Arbor with Kids resides experienced an extended outage starting around 7p on Christmas night and extending until the morning of December 30. During that time the site was completely down. This was a major outage that affected many servers from the company that owns the servers.
The hosting company had been observing increasing outages and other issues with the server company and had laid the groundwork for a new server company with plans to migrate all of their clients in 2016. With this groundwork already in place, they were able to migrate Ann Arbor with Kids to the new server company on December 31.
Unfortunately, with the migration to the new server we are still experiencing intermittent outages. My host and the new server company (who is based in Lansing) have discovered that the old servers were corrupted (likely for several months when the old server’s management was transferred from their previously small company to a larger server company). This corruption has contaminated our site which is causing the intermittent outages. Because the corruption appears to extend back for several months, reverting to a backup is not a viable option. My host is working with the new server company as the issues develop to solve them and get us back to a stable operating environment. (The issues are not specific to Ann Arbor with Kids and are affecting my hosts other clients as well.)
Trust me, I am probably more frustrated than you! I am thankful that I have a host who is working so diligently to get us back online.
