Site downtime

Early this morning I discovered that the site was down. This was about 9 AM local time, and Monit had sent its first alert around 1 AM.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to perform in-depth investigation until late this evening. Luckily, an EC2 instance restart cured the problem, so the total downtime was around 20 hours, but this was still the longest downtime I've had for about 3 or 4 years now.

I'll be watching the instance carefully over the next few days, but my gut feeling is that everything will be ok now. One of the joys of hosting on AWS is that instances are basically disposable because they are so easily recreated, and EBS volume snapshots provide effectively unlimited, almost-free backup.