New Website!

Last weekend, I decided to upgrade to this fancy new blog-site format.  You like it?  I do!

It has taken me until now, nearly a full 6 days (forever in internet time) to “launch” the site because of problems with my hosting company and the functionality of their servers.  You might have noticed this if you have visited recently and clicked on any of the tabs at the top of the page that link within this blog-site.

I was working on Saturday afternoon, rerouting all of my URLs to direct to my new site home www.randivossphotography.com. I’m not an expert at writing code, by any stretch of the imagination, but I thought I could handle this.  Apparently not.  I was working, testing things out, and then, POOF, no website.  Nothing.  I couldn’t log into my site manager, my FTP account was empty, my site was gone. Sorry to “nerd out” on you there, but it was pretty upsetting.

Right away, I contacted my hosting company for help.  They have excellent customer service, with both a 1-800 number and Live Online Chats.  I was helped very quickly in an online chat, writing frantically to describe my issue.  Matt R explained to me that there was a problem with the servers and that my website outage would be resolved, without data loss.

Matt R.: Unfortunately, the issue is not yet resolved. The updated ETR is 7:00 PM MST.

Randi: okay (and sorry if my code meddling crashed the internet)

Matt R.: I seriously doubt that your code is at fault.

Well, that was hilarious to Ryan.  Turns out that there is no way the server problems were my fault which was confirmed when I received this email.

“On Saturday, February 20th at approximately 2:20 p.m. MDT, the server your account is on experienced some hardware failure as a result of an annual fire system inspection at our Data Center (DC). An inadvertent release of Inergen was triggered in the DC environment. The release was triggered by an actuator that was not removed as required in the DC’s pre-test checklist. As such, the entire DC was impacted at some level, however not all servers were affected. This error was not the result of a mistake by WestHost employees, our hardware or systems. The mistake was triggered by an error from a vendor. With that said, we take responsibility and are doing everything we can to restore all systems completely.”

Basically, the sprinklers went off and the servers got wet.  I regained some functionality over the next few days, but some links within my site were still experiencing an “Internal Server Error.”  Five days later, I’m back online and feeling fine.

Now for the good part……what do you think of my new blog-site?  Now that I can access my site, I’m planning more changes now and adding new galleries and information over the next few weeks.