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Y'know, if there were a small group of trusted people scattered across the globe with remote access to the server reset we wouldn't have this problem.
A couple of years ago when my brother was doing some CF work for Matt and he had access to the server I must have asked him to reset it a dozen times or so.
We've had a lot of discussions about improving mefi's uptime but it all basically ends in Matt saying that he's looking into it, pulling in some favours, and it'll all be better soon. There are approximately one gazillionmabillion things he could do to improve matters until then but he hasn't seemed all that interested.
I've come to the conclusion that Matt secretly quite likes the server going down while he's asleep - it means he's less likely to wake up to a shitstorm. Understandable really.
What keeps breaking? [she asked cluelessly]
If you search through the metatalk archives then.. oh. Uh, nevermind.
danostuperstar: I don't know if anyone here or at MeFi knows him or not. He doesn't really post to MeFi, though I would guess he reads it occasionally. I don't know how he originally knows Matt. He had to back out of doing the CF work for Matt back then to do something at Adaptive Path. My brother's life is often a mystery to me.
I'm not going to namedrop him 'cause that wasn't my intent, I respect his privacy, I don't really want to stand in his shadow any more than I do (which is little, 'cause we don't operate in the same spheres and I'm proud of him, frankly) and I'm not entirely sure whether or not he wants to be directly linked to me via MeFi, considering how much of a outspoken and vocal weirdo I can me sometimes. We disagree on a handful of volatile things, recreational drugs and human sexuality, for example.
What I did intend to do was to illustrate that Matt has indeed given out remote access to the server and someone akin to a trusted contractor before, and that remote server resets are (probably) trivial.
The server was back online in a matter of couple dozen seconds or so usually when I prodded my brother to cycle it.
I know from experience that high-volume high-visibility websites often have a network of trusted people with access to the server, if only to be able to hit the virtual big red switch and bring the server back up remotely.
I could be trusted with such access. It's easy to say that, but I've worked in government grade data centers before as a night-shift support analyst. (Which is much fancier than it sounds. It mainly involved being able to pass a gov. background check and being able to follow the written procedures and make judgement calls on what's critical or non-critical, and what problems warrant waking up the real techs in the middle of the night to come in and fix stuff.)
Granted you wouldn't want me poking around at the ColdFusion innards or anything, but that's not what we're talking about.
It shouldn't be that big of a deal to recruit a few good folks and give them access to the reset function. Sure, shenanigans are possible, but that's what server/traffic logs and backups are for.
Yeah, I've seriously been thinking about uptime lately and that very issue.
I think it's bizarre that my three top-visited websites -- MeFi, Wikipedia, and Last.FM -- all seem to have such frequent slow or non-response. Sunday night it was Wikipedia all plotzed; last night it was Last.FM ... oh, and MeFi. *holds head and cries*
Anyway Last.FM at least has paying customers, and since I want to create a service in, uh, roughly the same space as 37signals, I'm trying to think about how to guarantee that to paying customers. Especially before I can afford a data center. Seems to me that paying customers shouldn't have to worry about uptime.
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