Greetings and Salutations -

Our main BellaOnline server had been down for about four hours, and is now back up. I always try to post updates on Twitter and Facebook when we have issues, so that's always a great first place to look to see what our status is.

The server was acting iffy earlier today and mail seemed stuck, so I rebooted all three servers in our set. The other two came up again, but the main server stayed down. The networking team let me know that it simply would not boot - that something seemed wrong with the main components - the CPU, motherboard, memory, etc.

We were very fortunate in that the three hard drives in the system were quite fine. So while it took a little time, they first backed them up for safety's sake, then put them into an entirely new system. The new system accepted them, luckily, and everything is back up and running in a completely new server.

Those of you who have been with us for our full ten year plus history know that we used to switch servers every six months in the early days! So it's amazing we've been on this current server as long as we have been. It was probably just as well that we moved to a new one.

Also, August is our quietest month, and the weekend is our quietest time. So our server was very gracious and chose the nicest time to give up! It could have course waited until midnight, the ultimate dead time, but there's only so much one can ask for in life :)

So I am very grateful that it had its last gasp at a nice, quiet time, and that our hosting facility was able to so quickly move us over to a brand new server. They are still doing a little tweaking to set it into place, so we might get one or two more outages as they finish that process, but they will be short.

I want to thank everyone for their patience over the past few hours. Interestingly, I've heard from several editors that they have had local PC failures in the past week or two as well. Maybe it's the heat! It's a strong reminder to all of us to back up our files regularly. One never knows when a server will fail. It's good to have all your data backed up, just in case. If you don't know how to back up your local computer, post in the forums and we'll help out. It's very important to do!

Please let me know if you have any questions at all!

Lisa Shea, owner
BellaOnline.com

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