Recently the provider of this Website, Typepad, moved their systems to a new datacenter. It then announced an additional maintenance period to update the system's architecture. That ended up in a mighty screw-up. For the last days Moon of Alabama was a casualty of it.
After a while the Typepad engineers recognized the problems and decided, correctly, to roll everything back to the old version. It took a while, but finally most stuff is working again.
There are two maxims in Information Technology.
I. Never change a running system.
Unfortunately there are circumstances, like growth pain etc, where one HAS to change things. That usually ends up in trouble.
Another IT maxim is:
II. Never change multiple things at a time.
This is where the recent Typepad screw-up happened. Multiple components of the system were changed at the same time and did not interact properly with each other.
Been there, done that. Back around 1995, I was working for a large international access provider who's systems always had growth pains. Everything was well prepared for a down time and a major update of the architecture. A short maintenance period was announced and we proceeded with it.
Every element had been tested before. But unbeknown to the software engineers the network providers, those with the physical access lines, had decided to use our announced down time for a change in their systems too. The two changes collided with each other and it took more than 24 hours to even find out what had happened. The roll back, not well planned, created more of a mess. We were down for 72+ hours. We had several million customers at that time. They weren't happy.
Typepad is now back and with it all the blogs that are running on it. I am pretty sure that there are still some bugs that will have to be cleaned up over the next days.
But the service has, in general, been good over the many years Moon of Alabama existed and ran on it. It is relatively cheap and relieves me of setting up and administrating my own servers.
That's why I will stick to it. For now.