4/3 site outage

Starting at about 23:52 UTC on Wednesday, 4/3, the database system that PointBuzz, CoasterBuzz and the hosted POP Forums product rely on went down in Microsoft's Azure cloud resources. Because of this, all of the related sites and resources were down for about an hour. Obviously, we'll be pursuing service credits for the outage.

PointBuzz and its forums are engineered with redundancy in mind, within the "US East" region of this cloud service. What that means is that there are backups for everything, so if a resource goes down, generally you shouldn't notice. However, if it fails completely within the region, as unusual as that may be, there isn't a lot we can do about it unless I spend even more to make it geo-redundant, which is to say that we can fail over to an entirely different data center in another physical location. But you know, this is about roller coasters and stuff, and the ad revenue sucks, so that's not going to happen.

The best way that you can help cover the cost of the (usually adequate) redundancy is to join CoasterBuzz Club. Those memberships help cover the cost regardless of the sad state of the ad revenue market, despite rising traffic over the last few years. Your membership is certainly appreciated.