Server Problems

Our server in Texas went down in the afternoon yesterday and didn’t get back up until pretty late last night. That was pretty annoying. I can only imagine what kind of mail failed to deliver during the down time. So I hopped on over to Roller Network and set up a back up MX record to hold and deliver emails in case my server misbehaves again. Roller Network provides free back up DNS and MX service.

After this experience, I think I am going to set up a rsync scheduler to back up all mine and my clients’ data on our spare Mac’s hard drive at home soon. Growing pains of small business… The operation is big enough to warrant its own server but not profitable enough to set up a redundancy system for down times like the one we experienced.

UPDATE 02/07/2006: Roller Network provides an awesome log of messages delivered through its system. It turns out that my mail server sometimes does take longer to respond (due to all the spams it has to sniff through) and some emails ended up delivering through Roller Network. It turns out that its delivery mechanism identifies and blocks known spam emails!! Wow!

via [Broobles Blog]