I just received an email from an annoyed user of the site, that they had not been able to access the old site for ages. I thought that was a bit harsh as I am now running 3 versions of the site, but then I realised that it was my fault, as after repairing the physical machine that the old site runs on, I had forgotten to re-enable the hostname to point to it. So it turns out that I’m forgetting how it’s all configured, and it’s entirely reasonable that other people will be confused as well. So let’s go through it all from the beginning.
There’s the PC in my study. It’s running stats.drfriendless.com (since I fixed it a minute ago). I suspect it is doing quite a poor job of it, but since I have to get past a bunch of people to get to it to find out, I won’t know for sure – my wife and my niece work in that room. The HTTPS on that system is a pain, and I have to go in there to fix it again soon.
There’s a virtual machine which duplicates that PC, and it’s called stats3.drfriendless.com. It’s more reliable than stats.drfriendless.com as it is not subject to physical problems and does not run over my home WiFi. So I think in the future the VM will become stats.drfriendless.com – probably in summer, when the PC overheats, that will become a necessity. The downside is that it’s a bit expensive to run that system – maybe $50 / month – but I consider that a tax I have to pay because I have not got the new site doing as much as the old site yet. (Hmm… and I just discovered that some pages that load on stats.drfriendless.com don’t work on stats3.drfriendless.com. *sigh*)
And then there’s the (mostly) serverless system, extstats.drfriendless.com. I can’t see that breaking due to anything except funding problems. Serverless architecture is just so robust – if that site goes down, probably half the internet is down with it. However that site still needs a lot of work to be done.
The other thing to consider is the state of me. I haven’t been doing so much work on the site for a couple of months, and it’s hard to say why. I am spending a lot of time taking my dog to the vet – this is the same dog as I’ve had since the site started, so she is very old now. So even if I wake up energetic and enthusiastic on a Saturday morning to get some work done on the site, at about 9am I have to go for a very very slow walk to the park and back, and usually then drive her to the vet for an arthritis injection. It breaks my concentration, occupies my time, and makes me sad. She has been such a wonderful dog for such a long time, and now she’s almost an invalid that we have to take care of. So when she finally shuffles off this mortal coil, my life will change, and I hope I will take more time to do my own things.
And then there’s work. Goodness me, I am a devoted and conscientious and competent worker! But that means that my head is full of work stuff, and not so full of stats stuff, and it’s a bit hard to motivate myself to think about a whole different set of problems just because the name of the day changed. But the problems also interbreed – it’s quite common that my boss will forward me some email from AWS telling us to deal with some problem, and I have got the same one at home. So I experiment at home to make sure I know how to solve it!
When I’m feeling slack I always console myself with the thought that the old site was built over about a 5 year period, and we went through years of problems while I sorted out hosting. We got through that, and I’m sure the new site will get through its current problems as well.
