CC was down starting last night. We’re in the midst of an upgrade which includes adding a state-of-the-art, ultra-powerful server to our existing cadre of servers, as well as performing additional upgrades. While this should be able to happen without significant outages, it didn’t. We hope to complete the process with little or no downtime.
Be assured that we are committed to keeping CC available 24/7/365, and are investing in the infrastructure to handle the traffic. We know how much you rely on CC, particularly at this time of year. Sorry to add to your stress!
On a scale of 1 to 10, my knowledge of computer technology is about 1.5, so I apologize in advance if this is a boneheaded question. Whenever any area of CC is unavailable to viewers/users, is it technologically possible to automatically redirect computers attempting to access the temporarily unavailable area of CC to an available area of CC on which a notice is posted advising viewers/users that the area of CC they initially attempted to access is temporarily unavailable, and explaining the reason for the temporary unavailability?
I am making this suggestion because when my daughter and I were able to access all areas of CC except the Forum almost all day yesterday (and intermittently over the past several days), my computer displayed only the generic IE “This page cannot be displayed” screen," which left me guessing about reason my computer could not access CC’s Forum. I considered everything from my frustratingly slow and unreliable ISP, to my freeze-and-crash (at least once an hour) adware-clogged computer, to a reason-unknown IP address ban by CC. I even sent CC an email inquiring about the reason my computer was unable to access CC’s Forum, which my daughter and I use several times daily for college-related information.
I am glad that CC’s Forum is again up and running. My daughter will be thrilled when she gets home from school later today, and she learns that she is able to access CC’s Forum.
Tuesday (er, Wednesday) Afternoon: We doubled the memory in our largest server, and when the hardware guys restarted the server after an outage of only a couple of minutes, it didn’t wake up properly.
The memory upgrade was intended to increase reliability and capacity, and we didn’t want to delay it until the wee hours when we would normally do an upgrade. No good deed goes unpunished.
