The main web server that drives X-Plane.com went down for about an hour this evening. Well, really, the server was fine, but something went wrong in the colocation facility where it lives. I’m still waiting to find out what went wrong there, and I suspect we may be shopping for new colocation shortly.
In the meantime we’ve turned down the TTL on our DNS entry and set up a live mirror of the main website. This means that if the main server is kicked off the air again, we should be able to make the backup live very quickly. This matters because X-Plane’s updater finds the download servers from the main website. No main website, no way to update, even if the update servers are fine. We can also set a DNS fail-over to be automatic, but I think the real answer here is reliable colocation.
