About a week and a half ago, my server shut completely down, never to be restarted again. I didn’t receive even a moment’s notice.

The series of events that led to this calamity began about three months ago when Hurricane Ivan slammed into Pensacola, Florida. At that time, Monica and I had evacuated the city. We decided to take advantage of the time we would have to be away from our home and work, and go to Ohio to visit my mother. We knew that this hurricane was going to be one of the most terrible storms to hit the Pensacola shores in decades; even still, there is no way that we could’ve been fully prepared for the news we were about to receive.

When I realized what a great cataclysm this storm had caused, my first thoughts were, of course, for my friends and family who had not evacuated (all of whom are okay, by the way). But then I started thinking about what a tremendous opportunity this could be. I had been wanting to find a better job for quite some time, but as with the majority of people with full time employment, I simply couldn’t find the time. But here I was, halfway across the country, with more free time than I knew what to do with, and not knowing when I would go back to work. It was time, I thought to myself…time to update my portfolio. Fortunately, I had brought all of my archival CD’s with me, so I had all of my old graphic design and video work readily available. I had a nice looking presentation in an attractive case put together in no time…several copies of it, in fact. So Monica and I resolved that we would stop and visit some friends on the way home, and that I would distribute my resume as I found opportunity.

I ended up finding a very good job opportunity in Charlotte, NC. When we arrived there, our friends told us that I would never get a job without making an appointment, and that I certainly wasn’t likely to get the salary that I was asking for. That very day, I walked into a design studio without any notice, gave them my portfolio, and told them what I wanted to get paid. A few days later, after I had gone back to Pensacola, they called me back and scheduled a second interview. I ended up getting the job, and getting the salary that I asked for.

My current place of employment, Dlux Printing & Publishing, had sustained some pretty serious damage to their building and equipment, and it wasn’t until about two weeks after we got back to Pensacola that I went back to work. Shortly thereafter, I gave my two weeks notice. I was pretty sure that I could leave the company on good terms, but the send-off that they gave me was so much better than I had hoped for. They spent over $100 on the best pizza in town, and invited me to come back and work for them if things didn’t end up working out. I made an arrangement with the vice-president to let me continue running my websites on their servers, as I had been while I was employed with them. In exchange, I agreed to help them with any questions or difficulties that they might run into with their website or server. I maintained full administrative access to their website and to the administrative control panel. I couldn’t have asked for a better hosting plan.

Perhaps now you’re thinking that you know the end of this story? Perhaps the server that my site was running on had sustained too much damage from the hurricane, and it finally just gave out? Actually, the server didn’t belong to Dlux Printing. Their website, along with mine, was hosted on the opposite corner of the country in Walla Walla, Washington.

After I moved to Charlotte and began to settle into my new job, I received plenty of phone calls from Katherine, the girl that I trained at Dlux. I now knew that there was going to be a pretty significant end of the bargain for me to keep up. Not that I minded; I had made it clear that I would only make myself available as I had opportunity. I still thought it was a great deal. But again, they were very diligent and faithful in keeping in touch with me.

And that tentatively brings us to the point of my story. I guess that I should’ve seen it coming. I received a phone call about two weeks ago from Dlux Printing. Katherine hadn’t written down the username and password for Google Adwords, and they needed it because they wanted to shut down their advertising for a while. When I asked them why, I was told that their roof had collapsed. Everything had been destroyed in the front half of the building, including all of the prepress computers, the proofing machines, the plate-making and developing machines, and all of the office equipment. As I understand it, their building had sustained some pretty heavy roof damage from the storm, and their insurance company had hired a pretty shoddy group to repair it. A heavy rain came shortly after the repair job had been done, and the ceiling came tumbling down. They are now in the process of recovery, and from what I’ve been told, their new prepress department is going to be a site to behold, with brand new MacIntosh G-5’s and top-of-the line PC’s, along with the newest and best to replace everything else that was damaged.

A few days later, their server went down. Like I said, I guess I should’ve seen it coming. Since Dlux was temporarily shut down, they had stopped doing printing for most of their small customers, only farming out the printing for their larger customers so that they would still have their business when they were back up and running. Keeping with this spirit, they decided that they wouldn’t need the e-commerce site that I set up for them during this period, because most of the business that came in through that site was new business. Since they didn’t need the site, they also decided that they would save themselves a little bit of money by not paying for the hosting service.

So about a week and a half ago, my server shut completely down, never to be restarted again. I say that it won’t be restarted again, because I spoke with Raymond, my former boss. They have hired a local website development company to rebuild their e-commerce site, and they won’t be running their website again until the project is complete. When they do get it back up, they will be running it on a local server.

I asked Raymond if they had backed up any of the data. He told me yes, but that they had not backed up mine. My last backup was made in September. That’s why, as you may notice, many of my posts are missing.

I know that they were in a pretty high-stress situation. But they called me once or twice during these dire circumstances, and I just don’t understand why they couldn’t have warned me about this.

Oh well. It’s water under the bridge as far as I’m concerned. It took me a week, but I found a good host of my own and got things back up and running again.

This printing company produces the absolute best work that I have ever seen come out of a middle-sized print shop, and their prices are really good. They print stochastically, which is a technology that most printers, even the larger printers, have yet to master. With stochastic printing, there is no dot pattern, and the screening is so fine that you can’t even see it with the naked eye. If you look at it under a loop, it looks like high-quality photo grain. It’s amazing, and I highly recommend them.

Useful Links:

Dlux Printing & Publishing, Inc. (For whenever they get back up and running.)