So you might have noticed the site has been down for a week or so. (If you didn't notice then you're a bastard and you don't love me). The server on which BinRock is hosted is (was?) near New Orleans, which is currently underwater thanks to Hurricane Katrina.

The site went down about the time the storm started to hit New Orleans, and has remained inaccessible since then. The server was on the second floor of a building, so it's possible that the only problem is a power outage. However, since I've read that 80% of New Orleans is under up to 20ft of water, I figure there's a very real possibility my server is currently making friends with a family of carp who have taken up residence in its spacious interior.

Since the area was evacuated prior to the hurricane, and is currently quite inaccessible, I probably won't know the fate of my server one way or the other for at least a few weeks. Of course, I can't really complain; so many people lost their homes, businesses, and even their lives. I was probably one of the least affected by this hurricane.

Fortunately, my innate geekiness had driven me to set up real-time database and email replication on my Linux server at home, so I had an up-to-the-minute backup of the most important data pertaining to my users and their websites. I lost the photos themselves (I didn't have the bandwidth to back those up over the internet), but at least the majority of the photo gallery data — captions, tags, and comments — is safe. I assume most people keep copies of their photos on their own computers too, so those can always be re-uploaded.

Within hours I had a replacement site up and running on my Linux server at home, but hesitated to make it live because my home internet connection is so tiny. The website would have been ten times as slow as it was before, and my parents would probably be mad at me for maxing out the internet connection.

Instead, I bought hosting at Jumpline.com. Unfortunately, most hosting solutions are far more limiting than the fairly unrestricted situation I was used to when I had my own server. The main problem was disk space; most hosting plans give you somewhere between 1-3 GB, but my photo gallery alone takes up around 12 GB. After eliminating all the full resolution images, I was able to get it down to 2 GB, so I bought the $35/mo plan at Jumpline which gives you 3 GB of disk space and 20 GB/month of bandwidth. I can probably deal with that for a month or two until the deal with the real server gets sorted out.

So I spent the last few days getting this set up, and it seems to be working fine now, so I'm making it live. I'm still working on uploading all the photos, so it will be a bit stark around here for another day or two. Bear with me. Thanks.