Sun Aug 22, 7pm:

OK, we seem to be back up and running on the primary server. Fingers crossed. You may resume normal operations. Forums should be good to go. Enjoy!

Sun Aug 22, 2pm:

Looks like we're down again. According to Winhost, they're working on the problem. I hope they get the problem resolved today, since Monday is typically my busiest day of the week, traffic-wise.

In the mean time, I restored this morning's backup of the SQL Server database to my backup server. The site is therefore as it was this morning at around 5am when the backup ran. So any posts, orders, new customers, etc. will NOT show up until the original database comes back online. Yes, I have all of that data backed up too. It's in my office Access database. If for some reason the primary server doesn't come back online I can always restore that... manually. 

For now, you should be able to watch any courses you had on your account before this morning.

DON'T POST ANYTHING in the Forums. Any posts and comments will NOT be saved. Sure, you can post if you want to, but it will be deleted when the original server comes back up. Sorry. 

I'll update or remove that yellow notice bar at the top as soon as everything goes back to normal.

Yeah... I hate this as much as you do.

Oh, and yes, you CAN place a new order, however you won't receive your courses until the primary database comes back online. 

Feel free to post your comments, complaints, thoughts, and rants below. I'll read them... but they won't get saved when the main DB comes back online... so knock yourself out. LOL

Sat Aug 21:

Had a little server outage today. Nothing crazy. Our SQL Server over at Winhost went down for about an hour. Since most of my site is fed from the database, that basically takes the whole site down. I could put a little HTML message up saying we're down, but that's about it.

Fortunately, the folks at Winhost are pretty on the ball. No web site is going to be up 100% of the time. Even major sites like Microsoft, Google, or Twitter have gone down from time to time. But the folks at Winhost got right back to my email quickly. They let me know they were aware of the problem. They got me back up and running in about an hour. Apparently it was an issue that affected a dozen or so of their servers. So, as long as we remain back up, I'm happy.