We forget how dependent we are on technology — until the electricity goes off. This part of the Hudson Valley – Ulster County — is a relatively rural area, so we’re subject to outages in storms as tree limbs interfere with electrical lines. The utility company generally responds within hours so outages can turn into a fun break, a time to get the family together telling scary stories with candles flickering, or a time to meet the neighbors.
Sometimes the outage is more isolated, as in this afternoon’s WordPress.com outage. Since WordPress itself is affected you can’t “Dial Home” to find out what’s happening. And it’s companion WordPress.org is missing the opportunity of playing helpful neighbor and informing WordPress.com clients what’s happening. Fortunately, this site is hosted elsewhere so it is still up and running. But I have three of my own sites on WordPress.com. I caught an early tweet so I knew what was going on, but still it is disconcerting.
I went to one site in relation to a project that I’m working on — it’s supposed to be the communication site for the new joint venture of our two major hospitals. On some tries I get a straight error message: <em>The webpage at http://www.healthyulster.org/ might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.</em> But alternately I’m directed to a GoDaddy! site that says it’s parking the site and offering links to diet sites. While smart keyword association by GoDaddy! this is probably not what our hospitals had in mind.
Okay, it’s now over an hour. Time for the lights to come on! And just as there’s a spike in generator purchases after major storm outages, looks like I’ll be backing up differently or changing my hosting arrangement.
Tags: Hudson Valley, Ulster County, web hosting, wordpress.com