[PW] Apologies for Temporary Outage

[John Franklin]

I apologize for the list being down for 12 hours (more or less) this  
morning. It was all my fault. (Or nearly all. A certain hosting  
company shares the blame.) The problem is fixed for the foreseeable  
future. Those who want to know the reasons why things went wrong can  
keep reading; everyone else can (I hope) just accept the apology.  
Thanks.

Project Wombat has split hosting. The actual distribution of the e- 
mail lists is done through the kind offices of Project Gutenberg,  
which I hope needs no introduction. Our website and DNS entry,  
however, are hosted through PowWeb. Mostly because I have an account  
there which is prepaid.

I got an account at PowWeb several years ago because (at the time)  
they had one of the best feature sets at (again at the time) a good  
price point. Their support people were friendly and helpful, and they  
kept improving their feature sets.

Then they got bought by some other company. Since the buyout, all the  
good features have, at best, stayed the same. Many of them have  
vanished, or been significantly eroded. (For example, they reduced  
mailbox quotas from an already substandard 50 MB to a ludicrous 20.)  
And, of course, a lot of automated systems broke down.

It is the latter peculiarity which caused today's problem. As you may  
have noticed, we are coming up on Project Wombat's second anniversary.  
Well, the old PowWeb used to send out warnings when domain registries  
were about to expire. The new one doesn't. It just so happens that the  
two years of "project-wombat.org" I paid for when the lists started  
expired at midnight.

I have paid for another renewal (two years again) and added a warning  
in my calendar software which will bug me about this on January 9,  
2010. The renewal has gone through already, but it may take some time  
to filter through to everyone, depending on what your local DNS  
servers are doing. Everything was working again within about 10  
minutes for me.

(I'm also considering transferring everything to some other host, such  
as DreamHost; the reason I haven't is that PowWeb manages to be just  
good enough to make transferring to another host more hassle than  
dealing with PowWeb's problems.)

-John Franklin