a pleasant problem

Geriatric1927 (a very popular YouTube user) launched a new web site recently and it got slammed by so many visitors that it went down almost as fast as it went up. Peter spoke about it and read a letter by his webmaster about what caused the issue originally, i.e. craploads of legitimate web traffic.

As far as a web site is concerned, this is a problem which is not a bad one as long as it can be fixed. 🙂

This reminded me to download a backup of my own site which I'm doing right now as I'm writing this.

Part of the reason I very rarely host content elsewhere is because I don't like it when I can't retrieve a backup. For example, if your blog is on Blogger, or LiveJournal or Xanga or any of those other freebie blog sites, can you download a backup? Is it even possible? What if the place that hosts your content goes down tomorrow? Is all your stuff at that point gone forever?

I know a few people that use freebie blog sites (and some even pay for "advanced features"). If they lost their blog they would probably weep for days. I can totally understand why.. I mean, if you put all this effort over several years time only to lose it, you'd weep too (even if it was in private where no one could see you). 🙂

A big perk of having a dot-whatever (com/net/org, etc) is that you can physically backup everything. All of it. Nothing is left out.

So in worst case scenario, if the server that hosts this site got hit by a bolt of lightning tomorrow, and the backup servers all got destroyed in some freak bulldozer accident - I still have a local copy. (grin)