As you might have noticed recently, eWillys was offline. This was as much a surprise to me as it was to everyone else.

What happened? Last Wednesday eWillys’ web server stopped functioning correctly. When rebooted the server would function correctly for a minute or two, before becoming overwhelmed. Successive reboots proved useless.

What caused the problem? We still don’t know. After fiddling around with the server, we (meaning the McDonagh Brothers .. not much I could do) determined that the web server ran fine if it was not allowed to communicate with the wilds of the internet. What we concluded was that something might have been injected onto the server that was feeding back onto the web, consuming the resources of the web server. But, truthfully, we don’t know, because it didn’t work long enough to dissect.

The solution? After discussing the problem, I learned the McDonagh’s had built a cloud platform and were moving clients to it. I made the call to move eWillys to their cloud sooner than planned and move it onto the latest installation of a clean version of WordPress.

Why did that take 5 days? The problem was that they were already in the middle of moving other clients, so I needed to wait. While we waited, they tried restarting the server from time-to-time, but the same thing kept happening.

So, the good news is that eWillys is now on a faster platform. And, the move would have occurred anyway, so we have that out of the way!

UPDATES: During the downtime I created the code for a couple updates (which I still need to install). One is a bit of code that auto-marks post older than 6 months.

The second changes the way eWillys functions. When you click on a post’s comment or title link from the front page, a new browser tab will open. I am hoping this reduces the need to jump back and forth between the front page and individual posts. I will get that pertinent files installed in the next day or two.