You may have noticed that your site was unavailable last friday (July 16th at around 12:30 PM PST). The downtime lasted about 30 minutes and was caused by a hardware failure with one of the core routers at the data center that hosts our servers. This affected their entire data center, including our server. It was not a problem with our server per se, but a network problem that slowed or stopped traffic from getting to our server. We take uptime very seriously, but these things happen, unfortunately, despite redundancies and backups in the network.

Our secondary backup server (located in California), detected that our main server (located in Montana) was unreachable and promptly redirected all traffic to itself. However, at the moment the backup server is not a full sync of our main server, so all it can display is a nice error message that explains the problem (not the entire website, but better than a white screen). In the future, though, we plan on creating a fully redundant backup server, so that these if one server fails, the second server will take over. That is too costly for us at the moment (without raising prices), but once we get more clients to share the costs, we'll be able to do this. This is one of the advantages of our platform, we can share the costs of hardware and maintenance over a larger group of clients and everyone benefits.