About 8 pm last night the email accounts we use here at FOSS Force went down. The problem was a server located at a datacenter in Pennsylvania that suddenly disappeared from the Internet. The server was used by us to host our oldest website, Alternative Approaches, a site we made unavailable to the public a few months ago as we’ve worked to reboot the site with a new look and feel. However, we have continued to utilize the domain as our main email domain. The site is our only web property that doesn’t reside on the server we use to host FOSS Force our other web properties.
Evidently the datacenter where the server is located had plans in place to migrate the data on the server to a server at a new datacenter they had built. They had notified the hosting company that operates the server of their plans and promised to issue a “heads up” before the migration took place. The datacenter estimated that service would be disrupted for approximately 3 hours while the migration was taking place. However, yesterday afternoon the datacenter began the migration without warning. At present, the server has been unreachable for over 19 hours. Repeated attempts to contact the datacenter by the hosting company have resulted only in “migration in process” responses.
At about noon today we decided we couldn’t continue to run our business without email and changed the nameservers associated with the site to point to the server we operate for all of our other sites. A little after 3 PM EDT this afternoon the change had propagated through the web enough that our email client could connect with the proper server–meaning we’d restored our email.
If you sent an email to us at chall at alternativeapproaches dot com since about 8 PM last night, there’s a good chance that it’s lost to cyberspace and that we won’t ever see it. If it was something important, we ask you to send it again.
No worries there mates! “Ship Happens” to all of us eventually! Glad you had enough know-how to resolve the issue yerselves!…Cheers!
EGO II