Protected by Scarecrow

Is it really better to know?

To know what? About your site going down. Or, in this case, ours. Sort of.

My wife and I had plans for yesterday that definitely did not include my sitting in front of a computer. On the other hand, I’d recently received some good advice about the Scarecrow website’s design, and had made several changes, so I wanted to kinda check on things in my office.

Big mistake.

It turned out that the machine hosting one of my sites had been down for hours. Scarecrow had been trying to let me know, but I just hadn’t been listening. In addition to the site, the affected machine had some of Scarecrow’s “agents” running, and also hosted Scarecrow’s Demo Site, which only exists to allow potential new users of the Scarecrow software to see what the application looks like once they sign up. (If you haven’t tried it yet, you can click “View Demo” at https://app.protectedbyscarecrow.com/.)

Temporarily losing the “agents” was no big deal either. They’re back-end processes that do the grunt work behind the Scarecrow website. There are enough running in other places that I doubt any users even noticed. Scarecrow kept running just fine.

So, what was the big hit? Well, to my day with my wife. We had fun, and I definitely enjoyed hanging out with our kids, but I kept checking my email. Once in a while I’d actually log in to a server with the terminal emulation app I have on my iPhone. Yes, that’s pretty geeky.

I mean, I couldn’t make the broken machine work. I’m in awe of the fact that it was eventually down for a total of over 9 hours, but what could I, reasonably, do about it? Nothing. At least not right away.

Yes, I moved the site to a more…uh…stable environment. But I really liked the company that was behind this mishap. I’ve never considered their service to be especially reliable, but on the other hand it’s cheap. And I get a kick out of their monthly newsletters. In spite of this incident, I’m going to continue doing business with them. They’re a great place to run stuff customers don’t see. Stuff that doesn’t have to be actually running all the time.

So I moved the site. But guess what? I already knew I should do that.

I guess a kick in the pants can be helpful. It definitely encouraged me to take action. Great. And all.

But c’mon. Yesterday wasn’t the day to be thinking about it. And if it hadn’t been for Scarecrow, I wouldn’t have noticed a thing. Is that good, or bad? I guess it depends on how you look at it. Next time this sort of thing happens? Chances are good I’m going to turn my phone off. As a short term solution, it’s not all bad!

Still. It’s hard to solve a problem you don’t know you have.