Man, the last week or so my site’s been acting up because the server I’m hosted on has had disk trouble, service trouble, and any other trouble you can conceive. First the disk went bad, then they fixed that but not all the services (PHP) were running… then they got PHP running but MySQL wasn’t running…

The last two days the MySQL service has been down but PHP has been up, which is why the blog was accessible through RSS (it’s static XML right now) and the main page was sort of wonky and empty looking.

The interesting thing is that the hosting company had said they were going to move everyone off that server to a new server… but rather than just doing that, they futzed around for a while trying to revive this old server. I ended up having to specifically say, “Hey, what happened to the migration? Maybe an expedited move to the new server for MySQL users is in order?”

I hate to be the squeaky wheel, but dammit anyway.

I did learn something, though. I realized that uptime metrics described in percentages are sort of meaningless. Maybe other people realized this long ago, but if you think about it, you could be down for a whole day and still have a 99.7% uptime. You’d have to be down for four days to break the 99% barrier. That’s four whole days - 96 hours.

I’m no longer interested in percentage uptime. I’m interested in hours of downtime. You want to impress me? Skip that “99.9% uptime” baloney and shoot for less than one hour of downtime per year. (And, yeah, I know the people giving out “five nines of uptime” garbage really mean an hour of downtime or whatever, but part of useful metrics is describing the metric in easily intelligible units. Don’t make me have to calculate that crap. “Oh, we’re only down for 0.042 days per year.” Give me a freaking break.”)

On the plus side, I get a good, personable response from the support people at the hosting company and they’re totally understanding and nice and easy to work with. From that standpoint, I can’t complain, and honestly, the service does make all the difference. Let’s just hope we don’t have another burp like this.