If you’re a loy­al read­er of the NPI Advo­cate, you may have noticed that this blog abrupt­ly dis­ap­peared off the World Wide Web around 1:30 PM Pacif­ic Time yes­ter­day (along with the rest of nwprogressive.org) and you may have won­dered, Wow, what hap­pened? What’s going on? After all, it’s pret­ty unset­tling to load up a favorite web­site and get a gener­ic Not Found error message.

The answer to that ques­tion is that the serv­er where NPI’s Core site and the NPI Advo­cate were host­ed up until ear­ly this morn­ing expe­ri­enced a hard­ware fail­ure. More specif­i­cal­ly, a hard disk died and could not be revived. It had to be replaced instead, and the files on it checked for integrity.

Disk dri­ve fail­ures are a fact of life, and while disks often quit work­ing with­out any warn­ing, it is pos­si­ble to mit­i­gate the down­time and dis­rup­tion they cause.

We don’t feel that our host did a very good job of that. By the time the par­ti­tion where nwprogressive.org resided was restored, half a day had elapsed, and tech­ni­cians were still work­ing on restor­ing oth­er cus­tomers’ accounts.

We chose in late after­noon to reroute traf­fic to a tem­po­rary error page else­where, since we did­n’t know how long the down­time was going to last. As the day wore on, we decid­ed the time was ripe to relo­cate to a new host, and, by ear­ly morn­ing, the migra­tion was large­ly com­plete. So far, we’re pleased with our new digs.

In fact, pleased would be an under­state­ment. The serv­er nwprogressive.org is on now runs very up to date soft­ware and seems well-tuned, which means this blog is a lot snap­pi­er. (What’s not to like about decreased load times?)

Thank­ful­ly, none of NPI’s oth­er projects — Per­ma­nent Defense, Pacif­ic NW Por­tal, the Olympia News­riv­er, and Check the Attacks — were affect­ed because they are host­ed sep­a­rate­ly in a state-of-the-art dat­a­cen­ter. (In Brief is host­ed by Tumblr).

Even­tu­al­ly, we will migrate the NPI Advo­cate to the same loca­tion, and we’ll use our new host as an emer­gency back­up in case of down­time there.

We’re big believ­ers in the adage, When life gives you lemons, make lemon­ade. Yes­ter­day’s down­time may have knocked us offline for a bit, but we’re back, and we’re back stronger. Thanks for stick­ing with us. And don’t for­get, our 2013 Spring Fundrais­ing Gala is com­ing up on April 5th. Buy your tick­et today!

About the author

Andrew Villeneuve is the founder and executive director of the Northwest Progressive Institute, as well as the founder of NPI's sibling, the Northwest Progressive Foundation. He has worked to advance progressive causes for over two decades as a strategist, speaker, author, and organizer. Andrew is also a cybersecurity expert, a veteran facilitator, a delegate to the Washington State Democratic Central Committee, and a member of the Climate Reality Leadership Corps.

Adjacent posts

Enjoyed what you just read? Make a donation

Thank you for read­ing The Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate, the North­west Pro­gres­sive Institute’s jour­nal of world, nation­al, and local politics.

Found­ed in March of 2004, The Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate has been help­ing peo­ple through­out the Pacif­ic North­west and beyond make sense of cur­rent events with rig­or­ous analy­sis and thought-pro­vok­ing com­men­tary for more than two decades.

The Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate is fund­ed by read­ers like you and trust­ed spon­sors. We don’t accept unso­licit­ed ad buys or pub­lish con­tent in exchange for money.

Help us keep The Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate edi­to­ri­al­ly inde­pen­dent and freely avail­able to all by becom­ing a mem­ber of the North­west Pro­gres­sive Insti­tute today. Or make a dona­tion to sus­tain our essen­tial research and advo­ca­cy jour­nal­ism. Your con­tri­bu­tion will allow us to con­tin­ue bring­ing you fea­tures like Last Week In Con­gress, live cov­er­age of events like Net­roots Nation or the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion, and reviews of books and doc­u­men­tary films.

Become an NPI mem­ber Make a one-time donation