At 5:30am Thursday morning, a hard drive malfunction was observed on our webserver. This hard drive was part of a redundant hard drive array that typically protects against this kind of failure. If one drive goes down, the other one takes over immediately without missing a beat. This unfortunately did not happen and the second drive went into offline mode instead of taking over. This is what caused the server to go down.

The on-site team immediately swapped the bad drive and set the server to start rebuilding the drive array. This process can take anywhere from 2-6 hours but due to some file system errors that the bad drive caused, this took well over 24 to complete. During this time a restore from backup was initiated to a new server. Which ever one finished first would be the one that went live.

The restore from backup process also went much slower then anticipated. After a few hours of little progress, the team manually started restoring account settings onto the server so that mail would start queuing instead of being bounced back. You may have noticed this when attempting to retrieve your mail on Friday or Saturday and it rejected your password. We started seeing some of our sites come online as early as 7:30am Friday morning, but most did not come online until the early morning on Saturday.

As of 7:30am Saturday morning all sites and email are back online. If you are still having issues with your site/email/settings please let me know.

We apologize for this inconvenience and please rest assured that we are already working on a better disaster plan so that in the case of a major failure, we can get things back online in a matter of hours, not days. All the hardware components are already being checked and rechecked and new software to speed data transfers of backups is already in the works.

As changes to our support structure are made, I will be posting information about them here. Check back to see how we are working hard to keep you up and running around the clock.

-Shane Flynn
IT Administrator

Posted by Shane Flynn | Filed under: Support Blog | Post a comment

Did you know 818 Studios offers music services in addition to its web services?  That’s right!  818 Studios can provide custom music for your website, ad campaign, radio spot, and more!  818 Music Services are headed up by Dave Kropf.

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We also provide engraving and typesetting services.  If you have music manuscript and you need setting for publication, or parts, or a complete  score, 818 can help.

Head over to the newly opened Music Services page to check out samples and hear (and see) how working with 818 can be music to ou ears.

Posted by Dave Kropf | Filed under: 818 News | Post a comment

Along with a spiffy new layout, support blog, and other cool features, 818 is proud to announce that we now accepts payments online! Head over to our payment page and you can pay for any 818 Studios product, service, invoice or balance on your account.  Pretty slick, eh?

Posted by Dave Kropf | Filed under: 818 News | Post a comment

We are proud to announce the new and improved 818studios.com!  Please make yourself at home and take a look around.  We offer several products and services to get your band, blog, small business, and more on the web. Now you can order hosting service, domains, submit support requests, access your CPanel, and even make payments right here on the site.

Stay tuned to this space for updates, news, and special offers from 818 Studios.

Posted by Dave Kropf | Filed under: 818 News | Post a comment

Greetings from the Support Blog!  If you are ever having problems, be sure to check here first because chances are we’re already on it!

Posted by Shane Flynn | Filed under: Support Blog | Post a comment