Website down

Update.--The Website came sometime before 10 am. I was on my daily 8-mile walk and it was back on-line along with my e-mail accounts when I got home around noon, so that about 12 hours it was down. Sorry for it but it's the fault of the Website host. They're down to 99.71% for the last two years now.

Some time after 10 pm last night (9/26/13) the host for my Website and e-mail went down and as of just after 6 am this morning it's not back on-line. I don't know why the length of the outage, especially for both the Website and e-mail servers, but likely it's a major problem.

I use a local host for both, but not my Internet Service Provider, for that I use the local phone company, since past experience with the host as the ISP is worse because they rarely had people on-site during night hours and weekends and outages sometimes ran into days.

Now I expect they might have some night shift and graveyard people, but from here it doesn't look too good if they have them as they've been down for over 8 hours with no indication when things will be back. I suspect later this morning.

What angers me with Website hosts and ISP's is that they never discount their bill for outages, saying it's part of what customers should expect. Maybe, if the outage is a power failure or other problem outside their control, but I don't think problems under their control should be assumed by the customer.

And even though it's really only a small discount over the monthly bill and the high percentage (99.73% for the last two years using a monitoring program) of operation, the outage percentage does deserve credit to the customer somehow to show they do care for their customers.

Anyway, I'll be gone for the morning and won't check things until this afternoon. The Website should be back, but if not, I'll contact the host as recently they didn't check all the customers were back on-line when they transferred host servers and I had to call and wait for them to fix the problem.

Sept-Oct Reports

I have put the monthly news, access, conditions and prospects reports for September and October on-line, available on the Mt. Rainier NP photo guide. I have redesigned the format of the monthly news Web page with better organization and presentation of the information.

I have also decided to change the frequency of the reports starting this summer and from now on. The reports will be updated every two months which better fits the seasons of the NP, as follows:

Winter - January-February
Winter-Spring - March-April
Spring - May-June
Summer - July-August
Summer-Fall - September-October
Fall-Winter - November-December

I will put the report on-line during the first week or so of the new period and update it through the two-month period as necessary to keep the information current as events changes in the NP.

This change allows me to focus on long overdue other work and projects and look for new projects. I'm still in need of a Google Map API Version 3 experienced programmer, see job announcement for the work. It's work up to $100 for 3-4 hours of work, more if necessary.