If you tried to connect to the Cobourg Blog this morning (Wednesday, 26 July) between early morning and around 11:00 am, most of you would not have succeeded. Hopefully, the problem is now fixed but I’d like to let you know some background on the problem.
First, know that for the last 20 years I have been operating a business called Cobourg Internet which designed and maintained as many as 60 web sites. Along the way, I used many ways to provide hosting and eventually settled on renting my own “dedicated server”. The good news is that this can be very reliable but the bad news is that it is expensive and requires daily attention.
As I “gradually retire”, I have transferred management of most of my sites to others so the revenue from these is now not enough to cover the cost of the dedicated server. Further, a planned EOL (End of Life) of the server operating system (Linux Centos 7) means my cost will soon increase significantly. (Equivalent to Windows needing to be replaced by Apple’s macOS Ventura so a new computer is needed). So my plan has been to move all sites to new individual accounts and I chose Hostpapa for that.
Over the past few weeks, I moved 7 sites and all of them work well enough. Then I moved Cobourg Blog and it was OK for a day but then came this morning’s outage. Although the site is back online, as of the time of publication of this post, still to be fixed is the performance of the alternative URL: cobourgblog.ca – I might end up just using cobourgblog.com. [Update: see Addendum below – as expected, now only cobourgblog.com is being used.]
Over the years, I have experience from several hosting companies and I have concluded that the differentiating factor between them is not price or even technology or features but how good their support is. Hostpapa is one of the better ones – and it’s Canadian. I expect that in future (I hate the term “going forward”), downtime will be rare.
And to address the elephant in the room – what is the future for Cobourg News Blog? I plan to continue to report on Cobourg News – especially Council news and to continue to maintain the Cobourg Internet site including its listing of “featured Events”.
But I would comment that until both the Town’s new strategic plan is issued and Governance is agreed (both of these are behind schedule), there is little news of consequence to report.
Addendum
26 July 2023 – 9:54 pm
Once again at around 7:30 pm the site went down and only came back at 9:43 pm
The good news is that this “configuration” has better security than standard – although it had a glitch in its setup.
It turns out that having cobourgblog.ca also connect to the blog content is not possible with this configuration. So remember to always use cobourgblog.com – that’s what you would get with a Google search anyway. Also, if you click the email link, it will automatically go to the correct domain.
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My wife and I thoroughly enjoy and look forward to this blog and would gladly donate to support Johns efforts
John, your blog is so well written, so pertinent and so important. Please keep doing what you’re doing.
Glad you are continuing with your blog John. Appreciate the time, effort, energy and financial reosurces you put into it. In particular, the time consuming moderating …and allowing for meaningful, intellectual debate—regardless of your point of view. An opportunity for proper civil discourse. Very rare these days, without vitriol.
Another technical comment from me on down time. My site went down this morning (major bummer) because someone had enabled automatic updates – not a great idea, as not all new plug-ins will work with every site. Better to have someone install one by one (we have someone who does this monthly). Lesson we learned a couple times this year unfortunately.
But there’s always Substack! And it automatically allows you to charge a fee for content (either for some or all posts) – it also lets you have multiple contributors if you ever wanted to slowly hand off the blog…..
Please whom ever gave LC a thumbsdown, would you please explain why the above is not good info.
John, as acknowledged below, your Cobourg Blog is a one off. You allow us to give voice to the topics du jour. Whenever you become skidmarks in the parking lot, it will be a sad day for your bloggers. Cobourg should be paying for your blog costs and possibly throwing in an ice cream cone or two at Harbourfront Delights.
We are spoiled by your efforts and don’t know how to give you a tip of the hat. Is it possible to have a Cobourg Blog GoFundMe link? And perhaps you can then consider succession plans. We don’t want our Council to have a carte blanche.
John, you continue to do us a great service. You mentioned ‘cost, expensive’ in your piece above. Is there anything we might be able to help out with?
Have you thought about shifting to a Substack? You don’t have to manage a site and it’s probably cheaper if not the same cost as maintaining and updating your page and server. You could also think about charging a nominal fee for your content which is excellent.
I’m trying to click on the “thumbs” and I get a message that I have “already voted for this” or “you cannot vote for this” Maybe not is “all well” yet.
Same problem for me Tucker except Lemon Cake which was still standing at 0 otherwise unable to thumbs up vote where there was already a vote up.
In reference to “lemon cake” “thumbs up” stands at 1 but if you click on “thumbs down” it erases the one thumbs up.
I agree with all comments and glad you are persevering. Only for you we would be in the dark about goings on at Council. Keep up the great work John
Another quick note to let you know that your work and efforts have been greatly appreciated.
There was a meeting at the Salvation Army chapel on Ballantine last night which was hosted by the Police Services about crime in the area. Quite a lively meeting although in the end I’m just not sure anything will change.
Again, many thanks for your stellar work.
Thanks Karen and just another reason to ‘disband’ our old and tired police service and bring in the OPP! Just my opinion.
I was hoping to read a report from John here about that CPS community meeting.
Residents are getting frustrated and rightly so.
Things wont change until courts change.
Incarceration does serve a purpose to deterrence…
So Glad you are persevering and also continuing with your blog John. We would have no knowldge of what’s going on at Town Hall (of consequence or not!) without it. Appreciate so much the time, effort., energy and financial reosurces you put into it.
Just a short note to let you know that we appreciate your efforts.
Well its working Now quite well in fact .
and I don’t think anyone wants you to retire without a replacement .
If you are looking for something to report on thats recently hit the Fan in our community
It just might be the same issues that heated up at the Alnwick / Haldimand Council last wk
VRBO & Air B & Bs It seems that Most of Northumberland is fighting the same problem but has failed to Act as many / most other Towns & Twsps. have 5 or 6 yrs ago .
No problem, John. After receiving the server connection message yesterday, I found a detour by going to your Cobourg Internet and clicking on the Cobourg News link and ended up here. We would be more than happy to donate to your expenses with this matter.
John to provide feedback I also received messages saying this site can not be reached it has sent a message stating it is not a secure site and therefore the anti virus system would not allow connection. Hope this helps you as you provide feed back of any problems you have with your new service provider. Later I was able to reconnect. Thank you for clarifying was beginning to wonder about the anti virus program on this computer.
John,
Today I have tried to “log in” several times. A few were successful, some were not. I got “site not available” or “site has maxed out its resources” messages. Hopefully things will stabilize over the next day or so.
How does one get a TD when simply stating a fact of what they experienced?
What is a “TD”? My decoding skills aren’t what they used to be.
Toronto Dominion, Touch Down, most likely Thumbs Down. Gerry is asking about the thumbs down Bryan got. Like Gerry, I do not know why Bryan got the thumbs down. It took longer than I like to admit to figure out the TD.