Why we were down 

I am not sure if any of you have noticed, but the site has been down for the last 36'ish hours.  I have spent most of that time working with my hosting company to figure out the problem and to fix it. As you can tell it is now fixed.

Here is basically what happened.  I had, and didn't relize it, Automatic Updates turned on to automatic.  Well Thursday night the update did its thing and then rebooted the server.  Well on boot-up it was getting a ton of errors and basically wouldn't boot-up at all.  I didn't find out about this until about 10:30 yesterday morning and immediatly try to start the server via my control panel through my host.  It didn't work. So we spent the next 36 hours trying to figure out what was going on.

My server is a VPS (virtual private server) and apprently you shouldn't do windows updates on a VPS because it can corrupt the install.  Well it corrupted the install and from what I gather took down that whole server itself that it was sitting on.  They ended up getting it back up and running, YAY.  Now my biggest concern was that if I can't do windows update then how am I going to get the latest security updates etc. Well, they have a main machine that they test everything and if that works out fine then they push it to all servers.  So I do have the latest updates I just don't have to manually apply them.

So the host learned something as well as did I.  I learned don't use windows update with a VPS in a server farm. They learned to actually start telling people to NOT do windows updates and to lockdown the boxes a bit more so people can't.

Upcomeing Stuff

I am going to continue with the TDD series and am going to spend a serious amount of time over the next week to knock that out as quick as possible.  I had planned to do that yesterday and today, but that didn't happen.

Also upcomeing after the TDD series I am going to do a project that I have wanted to do for a while and I am going to blog everystep of it because it all requires me to learn new stuff so it will be good content to blog about.  I'll post more details about what and how I am going to do it, but I basically plan to present the project and then go through as many steps of the development process, coding, and deployment as possible.  Please stay tuned.