Comments on: WordPress.com Blog Network Outage

By: Loren Baker, Editor

Loren Baker, Editor — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 04:14:28 +0000

Matt,

“As someone already said, we backup pretty religiously to multiple geographic locations, so even if San Diego had been hit by a meteor, your blogâ€™s data would still be safe.”

Thanks for clearing that up and very happy to see that WordPress.com is back up and running.

By: Bonnie

Bonnie — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 22:31:03 +0000

I messed up. Apparently the backup option hasn't been activated in the wordpress.com system yet. It is only available (as John Glors correctly notes) to those using their own webhosts, as I do. Sorry, guys, for that bit of misinformation.

By: Zhopa

Zhopa — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 22:29:05 +0000

Bonnie at al,

wordpress.com not only never had a backup plugin installed, but it’s not on the timeline even (as of 09/2005): http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache:XGD6rYZ1L48J:faq.wordpress.com/tag/backups/strip%3D1&hl=en&lr=&strip=1

(still down)

By: Jack Yan

Jack Yan — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 21:41:49 +0000

I donâ€™t know much about WordPress, but when I started my own blog, I knew I had to host it myself. Not only would there be outages, but there would be, for example, mass deletions! Last year I heard from a few folks whose entire blogs were wiped by Blogger over alleged TOS violationsâ€”when in fact they had not committed them. Guilty till proven innocent.
Good on Matt for responding here, incidentally. I knew there were frustrations while users waited, but seeing his comments here on a blog was pretty reassuring.

By: Jope

Jope — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 21:19:43 +0000

I happen to be the one that started the thread you mention in your post (I probably noticed the first symptoms earlier because of the time difference, I’m in Spain), and as a wordpress.com user, I can say I am pretty confident things will get back to normal soon.

If only having a paid service made any difference in these matters, but no, these things happen, and that’s why backups exist, that’s all.

Matt and the team are running a great system, let’s just give them some timeand we’ll all be happy bloggers again.

By: Matt

Matt — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 19:41:33 +0000

Hey folks, we are indeed working to get everything back up to speed. Because of the nature of the error, we have to shuffle some things around which is making it take longer than normal. We’ve had hardware failures before with little or no downtime, but unfortunately circumstances and timing aligned as such to make this one take a little bit longer.

As someone already said, we backup pretty religiously to multiple geographic locations, so even if San Diego had been hit by a meteor, your blog’s data would still be safe.

By: John Giors

John Giors — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 18:12:27 +0000

This is in reply to the other comments.

I’m a WordPress.com user, and I’ve never seen a backup option in the Dashboard. I have looked for one many times, and the best option I found was mentioned on the forums — download your RSS feeds. But RSS doesn’t appear to be a complete backup, either.

I think maybe the users that report they have a backup option are running the WordPress application from WordPress.org (and *not* using WordPress.com hosting).

Or, is it possible that some users have different options than others?

By: Angelo Embuldeniya

Angelo Embuldeniya — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 18:02:01 +0000

here’s a post from Dr. Mike, who’s one of the WordPress.com moderators:

Second Request:

Folks, as stated before, backups are made of each and every blog. Even the spammers get their blogs backed up. Your blog is not lost. Please kindly remember that. This is the internet. Stuff like this happens all the time. (Between system admins, we call it a backhoe problem. Someone looses their internet connection due to a backhoe taking out a wire by mistake.) As stated, backups are made on a regular basis. Us oldtimes here are pretty much used to stuff like this because it happens on occasion and we have come out of it fine.

Now please, a person plea. Stop pretending you’re all AOL users and please stop posting “Me too’s” all over the place.

And to those who brag about other sites like Blogger being up 100% of the time, all I have to say is “Yeah, right” and go digging for that thread about how many times Blogger has been taking off line due to DoS allacks themselves.

-drmike

———

Looks like it’s a question of when will our blogs on wordpress be reverted back to how it used to be :) — patience maybe needed very much right now ;)

By: Angelo Embuldeniya

Angelo Embuldeniya — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 17:57:57 +0000

Seriously I thought it was just my blog.. but when i checked scoble’s blog along with pommes.. i realized it’s the whole network.. i really hope they get back the service up soon along with the comments and the posts… seems like it just might be a not so nice easter for the folks at WP ;)

By: Loren Baker, Editor

Loren Baker, Editor — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 17:08:44 +0000

Good point Bonnie. This outage anderasing of Friday and Saturday’s posts does accentuate the importance of running a daily backup.