Just a quick notice if some of you were wondering why you hadn’t heard from any of the RedMonk folks this AM: our site was down from at least 9ish MT until about 20 minutes ago. You might not have noticed, because the pages that comprise redmonk.com and our individual blogs are static HTML (not a bad practice, IMO) and were thus unaffected – as were our feeds, but if you tried to search, comment, use the wiki, or anything else dynamically generated you would have hit an ugly looking HTTP 500 error.
The cause was the loss of a connection to the various MySQL databases that back our installations of MediaWiki, Movable Type, etc. I initially assumed that it was a Movable Type issue and opened a ticket with them – which to their credit they answered in under an hour, if unhelpfully – but as it turned out the problem was in fact on 1and1’s end. It’s the first such issue we’ve had. Unfortunately, I spent a solid two and a half hours on the phone either on hold or figuring out what the problem was and getting it resolved. After giving them a couple of hours to work on the problem, I called back and was told “we’re aware of the problem – is there anything else you need?” When I responded that there was indeed, that I’d like further information because what I’d been told thus far was insufficient, the problem was magically resolved. Weird.
Anyhow, as of right now everything should be back up and running, but please let us know if you run into any further issues. Apologies for any inconvenience.
