Philcoradio.com down; Philcorepairbench.com down; When will we be back???

Hello, friends.

I started this blog to keep you aware of things happening at my website, Philcoradio.com.

As you know, my site has been down since Saturday.

Chuck Schwark's website, Philcorepairbench.com, has been up and down during this period. As I write this, his site is down also.

Both of our sites are hosted by WestHost.

Here's what happened, according to the WestHost people:

"On Saturday, February 20th at approximately 2:20 p.m. MDT, the server your account is on experienced some hardware failure as a result of an annual fire system inspection at our Data Center (DC). An inadvertent release of Inergen was triggered in the DC environment. The release was triggered by an actuator that was not removed as required in the DC's pre-test checklist. As such, the entire DC was impacted at some level, however not all servers were affected. This error was not the result of a mistake by WestHost employees, our hardware or systems. The mistake was triggered by an error from a vendor. With that said, we take responsibility and are doing everything we can to restore all systems completely.

There were multiple servers impacted by this outage; some of the servers have had damaged hardware replaced while other servers need to be restored from backups. A large majority of the servers that were affected have since had all services restored and are back online. We still have a few remaining servers that are experiencing problems. We are doing everything we can to restore those remaining servers as quickly as possible."

While I can sympathize with their plight, it is my opinion that a web site hosting company to not have a better backup plan than this is unacceptable. Believe me, I share your frustration at not being able to access Philcoradio.com or the Philco Phorum which I also operate.

I emailed WestHost asking when my site would be back up. They did not bother to reply.

So, here is what I am going to do about it:

Once WestHost has my site back up so that I may access the phpBB files that make up the Philco Phorum, I am going to switch my site to a different hosting company. This means that the Philco Phorum as well as my website may not be available for several days. But rest assured my site will be back, as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.