I discovered that Unisa’s website was down today and yesterday without even going to the site. People were googling “Unisa down”, “unisa website down”, “unisa site down”, “trouble with unisa website“, “where is unisa’s website“, “unisa problems with website” and landing on this blog, so I went to Unisa’s website and sure enough it was down! It’s up again, but only under www.unisa.ac.za. If you browse there without the ‘www’ it just hangs…
But who am I to point fingers at other websites that are down for a day when mine is down for months! Well I’ll tell you this: WikiStudent was never down by accident. Whenever it wasn’t available it was because I chose to close it, not because of some server issue out of my control. (My Web host in fact guarantees 99.99% uptime).
I remember taking it down for a week in 2007 when I was changing the URLs to redirect from wikistudent.ws to wikistudent.ws/Unisa, and there were a few periods when I displayed the Xoops “Closed for maintenance” page (where only admin could log in). And what do we have now? Just a blog with nothing useful to anybody, so it is in effect still ‘down’. But bear with me - the wait will be worth it!
An email I received from my hosting company two hours ago:
As part of a continuing effort to provide the highest quality service for our valued customers, your hosting account, wikistudent.ws, will be migrated to a new server in 24 hours.
If you are using external DNS servers or your domain was created under a separate customer number than your hosting account, then you may need to modify your DNS setup with your new IP address:
…
Please note that your control panel will be unavailable for 24-48 hours. We also recommend that you do not make any changes to your hosting plan during this migration process.
Ok. Fine by me. This is the first time that GoDaddy have ever needed to move me, so we’ll see how it goes! There shouldn’t be any visible downtime for visitors, but I will be checking the availability of the control panel tonight!
GoDaddy is where I’ve been hosting WikiStudent all this time. This is a top hosting company in the US, and I like them because their packages are reasonably priced and they offer so much: gigs and gigs of disk space, terabytes of traffic, not to mention several databases and hundreds of email addresses.
There was a stage when I wanted to move WikiStudent to a South African server (which is where I host my .co.za domain) but it wouldn’t have supported the same amount of traffic. Pity, because sites hosted locally load faster. But since so many other SA sites are hosted in the US, I think local visitors are on the whole used to this time delay with page loads. No-one has ever complained that WikiStudent was slow before, so I’ll continue with cheap US hosting 