Site Outage Details

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Site Outage Details

I apologize for the downtime. Here's the short version:

• The outage was due to an automated tool used by our hosting provider
  
• No data was lost or damaged
  
• We're back
  

Longer version for the curious:

• Microsoft's search engine Bing decided late Friday / early Saturday would be a good time to try and process the entire contents of PG-HQ's Library for its search archives
  
• The sudden high volume of traffic from "BingBot" drove the server's CPU load beyond allowed limits
  
• At about 0500 CT Saturday, an automated bit of software at our ISP shutdown the site and sent me a notification basically telling me that I had to figure out what was causing the load, fix it, tell them I fixed it, and pass their review of my changes before they'd re-enable the site
  
• I was on a hiking trip and unable to get in front of a computer until Saturday evening
  
• I quickly narrowed it down to BingBot and adjusted our code to block that particular webcrawler, then informed the ISP's tech center
  
• Due I assume to it being the weekend, it took them ~16 hours to review and approve my changes and unlock the site
  

Conclusion
I again apologize for the outage. This is the only significant outage we've experienced in over 10 years of existence. Even so, the admin actions taken by our ISP are unacceptable. PG-HQ was shutdown without forewarning of any kind and then tech support was not ready to instantly reactivate the site. Had this been a business customer, there would have been a serious impact to revenue.

As such, starting this week I'm beginning the migration to an upgraded, more professional hosting provider. This will happen over the next few weeks and apart from some momentary downtime when we finally redirect pg-hq.com to the new server, you shouldn't notice anything different.

Thank you for your patience and understanding!