After host network failure, we’re back from the dead

Our home page yesterday.

Just a quick note to say sorry for the site being down almost all of yesterday. We noticed the site stopped loading in the morning and it didn’t return until the wee hours of last night.

Here’s what happened: Our server host, Hostgator, experienced a network outage at one of their data centers that took down thousands of sites across the web (here are the latest details if you’re so inclined). It was their problem, which meant we couldn’t do anything but sit back, wait, and hope they could fix it quickly.

We’ve had our share of server issues over the past nine years; but things have stabilized a lot recently thanks to the help of our phenomenal system/server admin, Ryan Aslett. We have a dedicated server at Hostgator which we devote a fair amount of cash to each month, so we expect it to be reliable. While a tiny bit of downtime is just part of doing business on the web and is somewhat expected, an entire day is rare and quite disruptive.

Now we’ll sort things out with Hostgator and make sure everything is where it should be now that the lights are back on.

Before we get back to our regularly scheduled programming, we thought you’d enjoy the fun tweets some of our friends shared yesterday as the hours of outage dragged on and on and on…

We took down @BikePortland just for shits and giggles. What's power worth if you're not going to have fun with it once in a while, right?

— Bike Lobby (@BicycleLobby) April 17, 2014

Putin swears: no russian troops responsible for @BikePortland occupation.

— radioactivity.fm (@radioactivityfm) April 17, 2014

@bikeportlandia @BikePortland i alphabetized my kombucha bottle collection

— Aaron Brown (@ambrown) April 16, 2014

I assume @BikePortland went down due to the collective anger from site commenters hearing The Oregonian won a Pulitzer for OpEds? #kidding!

— Matt Haughey (@mathowie) April 17, 2014

We appreciate all your emails about the outage and your recommendations for new hosting providers. And thanks for hanging in there and finding some humor in what was a very frustrating day.