Gah! For those who were silly enough to a) be awake and b) sad enough to access this site between between 3AM and 7:30AM, you’ll have found that you received an error message along the lines of “Error establishing a database connection”. This was because the database ‘thing’ decided to pop its clogs and stop responding.

I reported the issue on the webhost’s support forum, but unfortunately, nothing happened for approximately 4 hours, and the site was left in a state of limbo, until someone from 34SP spotted the problem and rebooted the server…

Thankfully, this type of thing doesn’t happen too often, and it’s the first downtime I’ve noticed since my switch to the new server a few months ago, and to be fair to the hosts, this type of downtime should have been brought to their attention, and they’re looking into why it didn’t occur.

Sadly, this website feckup also occured with yet more flickr downtime, and as one of my forum haunts ObscureInternet is hosted on the same server as this site, it also suffered the same downtime as I did, which means that my entire nightshift was wasted actually doing work. Oh, OK, I only posted that last sentence to see if the “facebook grass” has spread onto personal websites yet!

Now, if you don’t mind me, I’ve got some Roger Whittaker to listen to.