I was down...

July 28, 2023

My personal site jasongr.im was down!

My own personal site was down for over 24 hours. It partially worked; however, the domain resolution was broken.

I recently decided to move my site from using Ghost Blog to Zola. The advantage is that I could use the static site hosting from DigitalOcean for free.

DigitalOcean, my primary hosting provider, has an offering called App Platform. It's incredible and you should read up on it. In short, you can host 3 static websites for free. I decided to take advantage of this generous offer with a swap from Ghost to Zola.

I write my blog and site in Common Markdown. I commit to GitHub. App Platform auto deploys. The nerdiest blog method I could find. Perfect for me.

Finally, the issue is that when I deployed it there was a bug with DigitalOcean's integration with Cloudflare. Cloudflare is the provider of their DNS resolution, I believe. I emailed support, and I spoke to my DigitalOcean account rep. I waited 24 hours. The site is back up.

The email I received said:

[...] We have noted the issue you are facing and currently, a few other users are also facing the same issue with the domains. Our engineers are aware of the issue and they are working with Cloudflare to resolve this. Meanwhile, we like to thank you for your patience. Please don't hesitate to write back if you have any more questions. We are always happy to help :) [...]

I'll see if they can provide an explanation.

It's not a good look to be down as a developer / devops guy. I'm glad to be back. I'm thankful for the free hosting; however, be aware that sometimes you get what you pay for.

Thanks, Jason