Coventry Power Cut - Web Site Outage

16 July 2006

There was a large power cut in the Coventry area last night which caused an outage on my websites www.WatkissOnline.co.uk and www.FirstAidQuiz.com. My www.PenguinTutor.com web site is hosted and was unaffected.

A large area of Coventry appeared to be hit by the power cut. The town centre looked OK, but looking out from that there were a lot of streets plunged into darkness. Some for only a short period of time, but others for up to an hour.

I've been thinking about it for a while, but now I've decided that I'm going to move my web sites over to hosted web servers. The outage wasn't too bad, and ironically the outage at Redbus due to a UPS failure had more impact on my PenguinTutor website. The problem is that manual intervention is reqiured on my home server, both due to hardware issues with the server, and a problem with the cable modem not resetting before the server comes up.

I will move the First Aid Quiz web site first, as that is going to be the easiest to move over. I am still uncertain what to do with Watkiss Online Site as I also run a number of personal services on that server, and like to have a platform to learn more about Apache and Linux on.

The server is up and running now, but watch this space for news of moving the web site to a hosted server.