My blog and the Community Projects site were down for about twelve hours yesterday. Both were hosted on one of my few non-RAID servers. As happens to servers from time to time, the poor beast suffered a hard-drive failure.
After a bit of diagnosing, I decided to decommission the server rather than repair it. Keeping a non-RAID system going isn’t worth the effort these days. Hard drives fail too often, and restoring from backup is too time consuming.
Most of downed server’s duties are now handled by one of its beefier, RAID-served brethren. I have opted not to move some of the low-priority services (e.g., the LectroTest mailing list) over just now. A new server should be arriving in a few days, and it will make a more logical home for these jobs.