[Update below]
If you've been trying to visit jansleet.drupalgardens.com or tenpillars.drupalgardens.com, well, you can't. Don't feel bad, though, neither can I. A big chunk of the Drupal Gardens sites are down, and have been since Thursday night some time. Drupal Gardens hosts them "in the cloud," and in this case that means they're using Amazon Web Services, which is having a major meltdown at the moment (it's so serious that I heard about it on the news radio this morning, and they don't usually cover web hosting failures). Clouds may look pretty, but they have a down side as well.
Meanwhile, you can scroll down and read a nice movie review.
Much Later: The short story is that the Drupal Gardens sites are back up, and the beginning of the new mystery ("The Mystery of the Quiet People") is posted.
Technical details follow.
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The longer story is that I have some things to figure out. Drupal Gardens will post an announcement tomorrow about their plans going forward, both how they intend to improve their communications (which were fine during this crisis – but all of which depended on the fact that their own website happened to be functional throughout; if it hadn't been, there would have been no communications at all), and their future hosting plans. I'm sure a lot of people will make decisions based on whether they stay with Amazon or make other arrangements. I had some nice things to say about Amazon
here, but just because you can sell books and Kindles and tea bags doesn't make you a web hosting company.
I've been very happy with Drupal Gardens so far, so I will not make any decisions until I hear what they have to say. Do I want to stick with them, with the advantages and disadvantages of "SaaS" (software as a service), or go back to my original method of running my websites myself?
[As a little background: this site is mine, it's hosted by a company that I pay every month, the WordPress software is installed and maintained (and customized) by me. On SaaS sites like wordpress.com and Drupal Gardens, they take care the hosting and the software (including upgrades and so on) and I post content and change the look of the site via a web interface. Drupal Gardens insulates you from the nuts and bolts so successfully that most users never even realized that the actual hosting had been outsourced to Amazon until the whole thing collapsed. The analogy might be to owning your own car, where you have complete control over where and when you travel but you have to handle repairs and maintenance and parking tickets yourself, compared to taking public transportation where you don't control routes or schedules but if something breaks it isn't your problem. No matter what, by the way, this site is not going anywhere. It's customized in ways that couldn't be done where I didn't have this level of control.]
My immediate reaction to having my websites down for 48 hours would usually have been to go back to doing everything myself, but by coincidence I had a reminder of the downside of that method because a lot of the code in the third novel chapters has stopped working. I know why, but it cannot be solved easily.
So, I think as a temporary measure I will start to post the chapters on a Drupal Gardens site (probably a new one), but if tomorrow's announcement doesn't fill me with confidence I will probably reactivate the utownwriting.com site and post them there instead.
(48 hours is a ridiculous amount of downtime, BTW. Very unprofessional. This site has been up for umpteen years and I'm sure that if all the downtime it's ever had was placed end to end wouldn't be close to 48 hours. Most of its problems have been solved in less than an hour, and most often within 20 to 30 minutes.)
