FasterSkier.com is back to close to 100% after a catastrophic server failure two weeks ago. While there is no way to confirm, we would like to think that there had to have been flames shooting out of poor Hedwig (the name of the now-defunct server). The FasterSkier blogs, which continued to show some erratic behavior over the last week, are fixed. In addition, during the work to get the site back online, we fixed several issues that forced us to eliminate the XCFeed section on the homepage. The feeds are back in the left column. As always, if you have suggestions for sites that we should add, shoot us an email ad info@fasterskier.com.
Several other site features are functioning again after a long hiatus. For some time clicking on most of the links in the top menu would not work – you can once again use those links to filter articles by category.
Thank you to all our readers for you patience and understanding during the downtime and subsequent poor site performance. In some ways the timing was ideal (basically not during the winter), while in others it couldn’t have been worse. Hunter, who manages the servers, was in vacation in Europe – he put in yeoman’s duty, working to get the site up and running from a combination of his iPhone, an iPad, baguettes and fine wine, and hacked computers at the business centers of various French hotels.
One of our major goals for the remainder of the offseason is to significantly improve site performance and reliability. FasterSkier is currently running on Hilda, our backup and development server, but we have a new machine in place and are in the process of configuring it. We are also rebuilding the entire site from the ground up, to improve efficiency and overall performance.
